


A Wolf of the Deserts

by SylvanWitch



Category: Supernatural
Genre: AU, Darkfic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-24
Updated: 2012-08-24
Packaged: 2017-11-12 18:46:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 53,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/494464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A devil's wind blows all the time across the plains of southwestern Kansas.  It's 1898, and Dean Winchester is fixing to become the next minister of the Sweetbranch Irregular Baptist Church as soon as his grandfather, the Reverend John Winchester, passes away of the lingering illness that's slowly taking his strength.  Sam, sixteen and sullen, resents the small town he grew up in, rejects his grandfather's preaching ways, and yearns for something Dean isn't sure he can give his little brother--not without sacrificing their immortal souls. When Sam rescues the mysterious boy, Lucas Volkov, from enslavement to a traveling medicine show, he thinks he's welcoming a worldly new friend.  But like his namesake, the wolf, Volkov stalks Sweetbranch with patience and grace, taking what he wants and leaving behind only sorrow.  Can Dean resist temptation and save his brother and himself, or will they both be destroyed by the wolf and the desires the wolf raises in them?</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Wolf of the Deserts

**Author's Note:**

> This was my 2011 spn_J2_bigbang project. It was inspired by _Munly and the Lupercalians_ awesome Gothic Americana concept album, _Petr & the Wulf_.

“And Jesus withstood the temptations of the Devil, who offered him power and riches beyond measure, denying Satan’s claim over Him who is the Son and over all the works of He who is the Father of us all.  And in these words, Jesus threw off the Devil, saying, ‘“Get behind Me, Satan! For it is written, “You shall worship the LORD your God, and Him only you shall serve.”’ And saying, too, “You shall not tempt the LORD your God.”

 

But we are not strong like our Lord.  We are weak vessels of a fiery spirit, and our bodies betray us time and again to the Devil’s temptations.  We give in to lust, to the thirst for whiskey, to envy for what others have, to greed and gluttony and sloth.  At every turn we disappoint our Lord, and still He puts out a hand to raise us from perdition.  We have only to say, ‘Get behind me, Satan!’

  
Say it with me, brothers and sisters!”

 

A ragged chorus of affirmations echo the preacher’s words, and he wags his head and sucks his teeth and says, “If you want to smite the Devil, you have to shout him down.  Let me hear you now, brothers and sisters.”

 

Louder now, the congregation cries, “Get behind me, Satan!”

 

“Again!” the Preacher shouts, arms raised heavenward, head tilted toward the canvas ceiling that flaps like angry angels’ wings in the devil’s wind coming hard across the open prairie.

 

“Get behind me, Satan!” Rings out clear and strong, and the faces of the people are broken by their fervor, sweat on their brows, eyes fever-bright, mouths moving to say it again, unbidden, some of them rising out of their seats now, one, a woman in faded calico, rolling in the dirt of the aisle, her bonnet askew, hair coming down, lips moving in wordless sounds.

 

“Sister March, is the Spirit upon you?” the Preacher calls, and everyone’s up, now, watching the woman convulsing in the aisle, rolling side to side as far as the wooden legs of the folding chairs will let her.

 

“Call out to your Sister, my friends, call out to her to give us the Word that the Spirit shares through her this day.”

 

“Hallelujah!” A gap-toothed old man calls, hat in his hand, eyes fixed avidly on the rolling woman.

 

“Witness, Sister March!  Witness!” Cries a heavyset woman, face red, gleaming with sweat, hair spooling damp around her cheeks and sticking to her neck.

 

The babble continues, gaining in volume if not in coherence, until the woman seems to spend herself.  She stiffens, toes straining toward the pulpit, neck cords standing out in vivid relief, and then slumps, unconscious, lips still moving as she loses consciousness.  Bud Grady steps into the aisle at her head, George Stevens at her feet, and as they lift her, Margaret Weller hurries to pull Jenny March’s skirt down to her ankles, so she’s covered proper as she’s carried out.

 

As the two men exit with their faithful burden, there’s a pregnant stillness broken by a collective sigh, as if the whole of the people under the dirty white tent had reached completion together.  Slowly, folks turn back toward the preacher, whose hands are shaking as he raises them over their heads—in blessing or admonition, it is not clear.

 

“Go now and make your way, brothers and sisters, but remember—Satan dogs your every step, and there is no free path to salvation save through the Lord and Savior.”

 

As if cued by an unheard cantor, the congregation begins to sing “I Need Thee Every Hour” and file from the tent, their voices rising and falling as they make their way toward the horses tethered in an indefinite half-moon in the fields to either side of the tent.

 

Dean waits until the last of them are gone before he approaches the wooden platform at the front where Grandfather stands, swaying as if pummeled by storm winds, though here, anyway, the wind only bellies the canvas, flapping, always flapping, like the noise of a hundred unseen angels.

 

“Do you want to go out to them, Grandfather?” Dean asks, taking the old man’s arm.  Beneath his hand, his Grandfather’s good Sunday suit is greasy, worn almost paper thin where the sharp jut of his elbow rubs it.

 

“Yes,” he says, with that precise tone he uses only under the tent.  “Maisie Willard is supposed to give me the tally for the church fund.”

 

Dean stifles an impatient noise.  The Irregular Baptist Congregation of Sweetbranch, Kansas, has been raising money for a proper church since the town was founded in 1881.  Seventeen years later, they’re no closer to escaping the filthy bellows of a cursed tent than they were when Dean first came under its snowy white wings as a three year old on his daddy’s shoulders.

 

Dean doesn’t remember much from the year they came to Sweetbranch to found the church with the town itself.  He can recollect, if he tries real hard, a vision of Grandfather as a younger man, wearing a new black suit, sporting a wide-brimmed black hat, his black eyes gleaming with the fervor of sharing the Lord’s work and Word with his people.

 

Grandfather’s eyes still gleam, but they haven’t once looked upon his beloved congregation since the year Dean was four, the year his brother, Samuel, was born.

 

Dean remembers more of that year, but he doesn’t like to.

 

Not for the first time, Dean wonders at the way God works, taking from Grandfather his son, Dean’s daddy and Dean’s mother, too, leaving him the scant comfort of little Dean himself and his newborn brother, both of whom had needed more care than the preacher alone could give.

 

Grandfather says God never gives a man more than he can bear.  Dean’s always thought that means Grandfather’s stronger than the majority of men and a sight closer to God, too, for all his suffering.  Like with Job, the affliction must come with the rewards of faith.

 

Dean tries not to notice the way Grandfather’s arm shakes under his guiding hand, the way the sinew and bone seem to shrink with every passing Sunday.  Dean puts on his Sunday smile as they pass through the tent flaps and positions Grandfather so he’s facing the stragglers.

 

Maisie Willard is waiting, Jed beside her, their two mostly-grown daughters a little further along the rutted path that hems the tent skirts to either side of the entry.  Deborah’s gotten handsome, Dean notices absently, her ginger hair spilling long down her back under the demure bonnet she wears.  Delilah, the younger by a year and a half, lives up to her name, staring boldly at Dean as he regards her, her pale hair gleaming uncovered as she takes in the weak morning sun, bonnet dangling carelessly from one crooked finger.

 

He returns his attention to the conversation as Grandfather clears his throat and struggles to say, “We’ll have enough by harvest, you think?”

 

“Aye, there’s a good chance,” Maisie answers, smile a little stretched, as if she’s trying on a new face.  Dean knows she’s lying, knows she and the rest of them are counting on Grandfather dying before they have to disappoint him with the truth:  Sweetbranch is a town made for sinning, and folks there have little use for the “holy rollers” way out on the prairie.

 

People want convenience.  They want pews and wooden hymnal boxes, altar cloths and organ music.  The faithful of the Irregular Baptists are a diehard breed dying by degrees nonetheless.

 

“Well, that’s fine, Sister Willard, fine indeed.  Jed,” Grandfather says, turning with the grace of long practice toward the silent Jed and offering an unerring hand to the farmer.  They shake, Jed muttering something about “pleasure” and “Sundays,” and then the couple move away, their daughters trailing in their wake like cut flowers falling behind the scythe.

 

Dean doesn’t watch them go, his eyes all for Grandfather, whose pale face trembles with palsy.  Now that the last of the congregation is out of sight, clip-clopping of hooves a diminishing staccato, he seems to have shrunk, his shoulders sagging, sightless eyes closing.  Dean has to wrap his arm around his Grandfather’s waist to lead him toward their lonely buckboard.

 

Balaam, their mule, doesn’t even raise his head as Dean helps his Grandfather into the seat and climbs up himself, only indicating awareness of the driver when Dean unwraps the reins from the brake handle and slaps their leather against Bal’s back.

 

A haze of dust rises from the mule’s back, joined thereafter by the cloud his feet kick up.  It’s been a dry spring, with precious little hope for a break in the drought.  Everything is covered in a patina of dust—hair and exposed skin, clothes, the worn red-letter bible Grandfather insists on carrying everywhere with him, despite knowing virtually every line by heart.  Despite that he can’t actually see to read it, either, of course.

 

“Your brother’s gotten himself into something,” Grandfather says as they turn down the long lane that leads to their home.

 

The house sits on a rise, untreated clapboard silvered and warped on the weather side, barn the color of clotted blood sitting back to the west, chicken coop downwind of the house taking up the side yard. 

 

Dean can’t see anything amiss.  The other plow mule, Samson, is in the paddock on the sun side of the barn, head down and eyes closed, dozing in drowsy time with the beating of his tail to keep down flies.  Beyond the far paddock rail, their windmill creaks and shimmies through its revolutions, pulling up water from deep in the earth, channeling it to the trough and to the buried cistern that supplies the house.

 

The chickens peck and cluck in their wire pen, and as Dean murmurs, “Woah,” and reins Balaam in, Rufus heaves his bloated yellow belly out of the dust and gives a half-hearted bark of greeting, nuzzling Dean’s hand and then Grandfather’s as Dean helps him down and into the kitchen.

 

He leaves Grandfather there to lead Balaam to the barn, calling, “Sam!” despite knowing, as he has since this morning, that his brother’s not home.

 

Sam’s bed was empty when Dean had arisen in the dim dawn light to start breakfast and take up the chores his brother was supposed to do, feeding the chickens, gathering eggs, tending the livestock and seeing to Rufus.  When Dean had gone out to the barn to feed and water the mules and their one riding horse, Custer, he’d seen that Custer was gone, too.

 

He’d told Grandfather when the old man had gotten up that Samuel had gone into town on an errand for him early.

 

“He might not make it back in time for the service,” Dean had added, knowing his brother.

 

Of course, Grandfather knew Sam, too.  “Horse pucks,” Grandfather had said succinctly, sipping his coffee with relish.  “Your brother spent the night tom-catting.  I’m warning you, Dean, he’s bound for perdition, that brother of yours.  I’ve half a mind to strip his hide when he brings his lecherous carcass back home.”

 

It wouldn’t be the first time Grandfather had taken the strap to Samuel.  Dean’s little brother had always been hard to handle, as if being raised without parents had made him impervious to _any_ higher authority.

 

Only Dean had any sway over Sam, and even that seemed to be waning as Sam grew—and _grew_ —toward manhood.  Sam frustrated and worried Dean by turns, but right now, Dean was just tired.

  
Tired of taking care of the farm and his grandfather, too.  Tired of having to make up excuses for his brother’s increasingly unpredictable behavior.  Tired of living way out here where no one came by except them that wanted something from his grandfather, something they were ashamed to get in town, like a healing by hands or help with a personal problem too precious to let go where others might overhear it and spread it like fire in the summer grass.

 

Reminding himself that it isn’t his place to question God’s intentions for him, Dean frees Balaam from the harness and lets him out into the paddock, vowing to give him a good brushing and to care for the sweat-sticky tack after he’s gotten Grandfather settled in his big chair in the best parlor.

 

Really, it’s the only parlor, but Grandfather always called it that anyway, regardless of its furnishings, every piece of which is dust-dulled and listing on the uneven floor of the front room.  He’s got his chair there, horsehair stiff as dead fingers, always poking, seat back shiny with hair grease where Grandfather takes his afternoon nap.

 

Dean gets his boots off, slippers on, gives him a quilt for his lap and a glass of cold tea at his elbow, then hastens upstairs to change.

 

The stairs creak and groan like a complaining maiden aunt, familiar and irritating, as he makes his way to the room he still shares with Sam.  As usual, Sam’s side looks like he’s let in a cyclone, clothes strewn in dirty piles, a stack of books spilled across the floor, loose notes like bird’s wings gathering dust under the bedstead.

 

He hangs his Sunday suit with care, promising himself he’ll brush it out before dark—he never knows when he might get the call to take his Grandfather’s place at a bedside vigil or a difficult birth.  Dean’s never gone alone on one of these calls, but it’s only a matter of time. 

Of course, Dean’s never gone to school the way Grandfather had.  He’d been all set to leave for bible college back east in Topeka when Grandfather had taken his first fainting spell two years before.  Doc Jennings had said it was probably nothing, but the sweaty paleness of his Grandfather’s face had frightened Dean. 

 

The look on his brother’s face had been scarier still, fourteen year old Sam’s avid eyes taking in every nuance of Grandfather’s weakness.

 

Dean had known right then that he wasn’t going anywhere.

 

Still, people need a preacher, and Dean’s had plenty of on-the-job training.  He can’t compete in eloquence with Father Merrit, the Lutheran minister whose neat white church takes up a lot on Main Street, tucked between Bradley’s Dry Goods and the Post and Telegraph Office, but Dean’s sure he could still bring people to Jesus if only he had a chance to try.

 

With a start, Dean realizes he’s clutching the brim of his everyday hat tight enough to crease it, and he smoothes out the wrinkle before putting it on, not even sparing a glance in the cracked oval mirror that hangs above the dresser he shares with his brother.

  
Of all the sins Dean is regularly guilty of—coveting his neighbor’s church, for example—vanity isn’t among them.  It’s not that he hasn’t noticed girls like Delilah giving him long and longing looks; it’s just that he doesn’t much care.

 

He’s got Sam and his Grandfather and a shrinking congregation to concern himself with.  He’s hardly in the market for a wife.

 

Dean spares a glance for his Grandfather as he passes the parlor door, sees that the old man is already asleep, head back, mouth open, dragging in air with every wheezy breath.  He smiles fondly, chases the smile away with worry at Pawpa’s pallor, and then reminds himself that work doesn’t get done by itself.

 

Good thing Dean doesn’t mind work because their farm is never short of opportunities for labor.  He welcomes the repetition of it, the way he doesn’t have to think as he oils the tack and hangs it on its pegs in the wide aisle between stalls.  The way the steady sound of the brush and the mule’s heavy-boned patience lets him drift off into biblical visions, wherein he’s leading the lost tribe to salvation or sparing an enemy with soul-stripping mercy.

 

Or sacrificing himself for the love of his God.

 

Hoofbeats in the distance bring Dean’s head out of his dreams of glory to see Sam tearing up the lane on Custer.  The horse is in a lather, chest heaving, wide nostrils blowing red as Sam brings him to a sliding stop and leaps from his back, dropping the reins and taking a step toward Dean, whose eyes have already tracked past his brother to the boy who’d been concealed behind Sam’s broad shoulders.

 

The boy dismounts, too, and takes a hesitant step toward Dean, but despite his deferent body language, he doesn’t seem afraid.  His eyes meet Dean’s steadily, an assessing look that makes Dean feel exposed. 

 

Rufus whines, a neck-wrinkling sound, part primal worry and part something else that ruffles Dean’s skin, too.

 

“Who is this?” he asks, in a voice harsher than he’d intended.  Sam starts, but the stranger does not. 

“His name’s Lucas,” Sam begins, “He’s from Barnes’ Travelling Medicine Show.  I saved him.”

 

The last is said with the same tone a preacher might use to describe a successful conversion, and Dean’s eyes narrow on Sam’s radiant, hopeful face before shifting again to Lucas.

 

“From what?” Dean asks, low and deliberate.

 

“Willy Baxter Barnes is a bastard,” Sam spits, scowling. 

 

“Watch your mouth,” Dean answers automatically, still looking only at Lucas.  His eyes take in the boy’s underfed frame, the bracelets of angry red skin around his wrists, the yellow bruise blossoming to green on his burnished cheek.  The dark, sloe-eyed beauty of his face.  The strange, lithe grace evident even as he’s standing still. 

 

Dean has to swallow a sound when a shiver overtakes him, and he looks back at Sam to find his brother’s eyes, too, on Lucas.

 

“Barnes was keeping him chained in a covered wagon, Dean.  He’d only let Lucas out for shows.  You can see for yourself he doesn’t get fed nearly enough.  And he did other things…”

 

He doesn’t need to see the flush of shame climbing his brother’s face to understand what Sam’s talking about.  Dean had caught the boy’s flinch out of the corner of his eye and turned just in time to see a trace of revulsion sliding away from the edges of his wide, expressive mouth.

 

Dean might not need the trouble, but he can’t say no to this sort, not if there’s the devil’s own work involved.  If nothing else, it’s clear the boy’s been mistreated, and didn’t Jesus instruct the faithful to care for the least of his brothers?

 

From his bare feet to the frayed collar of his filthy shirt, Lucas fits the description of those most precious to Christ.

 

“Will Barnes want you back?”  Dean doesn’t bother to gentle his tone.  This is business they’re talking, man to man, and the sooner Lucas understands what might be at stake, the better for them all.

 

Lucas nods, confidence seeping away as his shoulders sag and his eyes seek Sam, who nods his head in answer and says, “It’s okay, Lucas.  We won’t let him get at you again.”

 

“How many will he bring?”  If Dean’s surprised at the way Sam sounds, solicitous and not at all his usual self, he hides it behind the gravity of his tone.

 

Lucas shrugs, a sullen look there and then gone in a flash, and Sam says, “He’s got a sharpshooter in the show and a couple of muleskinners.  But maybe he won’t come, Dean.  Not if he’s been…”  Sam doesn’t need to finish the sentence for Dean to know what he means.  Still, as the grandson of a preacher, Dean’s had plenty of occasion to meet a man where he sins, and he wouldn’t be surprised at all if Willy Barnes Baxter’s pride got the better of his sense and brought him out here, whether or not he’d have to confront the evil that he’d done when he got to the Winchester farm.

 

Dean gives a tight nod and jerks his head toward the barn.  “Get him settled in the loft.”

 

“You won’t tell Grandfather?”  Sam always uses Pawpa’s formal name, never the diminutive Dean had taken to calling him when he was just a boy.

 

Dean considers how it is always Sam who makes him lie to their grandfather and then snorts and shakes his head.  “I won’t have to.”

 

Sam’s face fills with resentment as he takes in Dean’s meaning.  It had been hard growing up in the household of a minor prophet.  Harder still for Sam, who had the Sight himself but couldn’t seem to hone it to any real purpose, plagued instead by troubling dreams that left him with a sense of doom that only abated after some ill fate had befallen the one he couldn’t even identify, never mind save.

 

For a long while, Dean’s greatest struggle had been to overcome the envy he felt when his little brother offered a vague revelation that Dean himself would never be privy to.  He’d finally settled his heart in the matter when he remembered what the Sight cost Sam—broken sleep and cries in the dark and always a darkness in the back of his eyes that said Sam was captive to something beyond his control to escape.

 

While it might help Dean in his budding ministry to be able to see things before they came to pass or sense thing about the people he was trying to save, he wasn’t sure he was willing to trade his peaceful sleep for the kind of nightmares that haunted Sam. 

 

Of course, his sleep wasn’t always peaceful, but Dean doesn’t let himself think about the other dreams, dreams he cannot remember in the light of day without a blush of shame and a rush of heat low in his belly.

 

Sam gestures to Lucas to follow him into the barn, and as the boy passes Dean, he pauses to turn his face full to Dean’s and says, “Thank you.”  It’s not much to go on, those two quiet syllables, but Dean thinks he hears an accent, as if the boy comes from someplace far away, well beyond Willy Baxter Barnes’ greedy reach.

 

He has half a mind to follow the boy, inquire after his beginnings, see if there isn’t someone they can send him so as to get him out of their way.

 

A huff from Rufus, who’d been unusually silent in the presence of a stranger after his initial strange sound, draws Dean’s attention to the house.  The clatter of something falling in the kitchen has him jogging across the dirt of the yard toward the side door that opens into the kitchen.

 

Grandfather is standing there, kettle lid in one shaking hand, cast iron kettle itself spilling the dregs of the morning’s coffee across the worn wooden floor.

 

“What do you need, Pawpa?” Dean asks, touching his grandfather’s hand to let him know he’s there.  So often lately, grandfather wakes from his naps confused and frightened.

 

“I wanted some tea.”  There’s a tremble in his throat that warns Dean a second before the man’s legs start to give way.  He catches his grandfather up, surprised and horrified at how light the big man has grown, and carries him back into the parlor, laying him on the worn settee and covering him with the quilt that had been abandoned beside Pawpa’s chair.

 

Pawpa’s eyes are open, but that doesn’t mean much—in the throes of a vision, Dean had seen his grandfather’s pupils roll clear up into his head, leaving only gibbous orbs where his milky irises had once been.  When he’d been younger, it had made Dean’s stomach flip sickly inside of him.  He’s still not used to it, but at least it doesn’t make him physically ill anymore.

 

“What is it, Pawpa?” Dean whispers, leaning close to his grandfather’s lips, which are moving convulsively, his speech indistinct, as if he’s telling secrets in a language Dean doesn’t know and can never learn.

 

Damp breath carries the word “wolf” to his ear at last, and Dean pulls back far enough to bring Pawpa’s face into focus.

  
“There’s no wolf here, Pawpa,” he assures the old man, resting a comforting hand on his rigid shoulder.

 

“Barn,” the old man says, stronger.

 

_Damnit._

 

“It’s fine, Pawpa.  Don’t worry.  I’ll take care of everything.”

 

Pawpa’s hand rises from where it trembles against his chest to snatch feebly at Dean’s sleeve.

 

Dean leans down again.

  
“The wolf will devour the world,” Grandfather says, and then at last, his lids fall like a veil over his moon-blind eyes, and his breathing evens out to sleep.

 

Dean lets out a shaking breath and wipes a hand over his mouth, staring blindly through the wall of the parlor as if he could see into the barn loft, lay eyes on what they’ve brought among them.

 

“Damnit,” he says aloud, finding comfort in the worn-old thrill of cussing, the forbidden heat of it making him warmer.  He lingers a moment longer, listening to his grandfather’s inaudible murmurs, as if even in sleep a voice speaks to him.  Then he goes back out into the midday sun to see that their guest is settled.

 

*****

 

“He’s not bad,” Sam asserts stubbornly, jaw set, eyes blazing with a righteous fury he really hasn’t earned.

 

“You don’t know that, Sam.  And anyway, I’m not saying he has to leave.  I’m only saying that we have to be careful of him.  We only have his word for what happened with Barnes—“

 

“And scars and sores, Dean!  You think he gave those to himself?”

  
Sam waves his arms wide out at his sides, whole body vibrating with the strength of his convictions.  Dean sighs, shuts his eyes a moment against his brother’s energy, licks his lips, dry from the light wind blowing dust into every word he says.

 

When he opens his eyes again, Sam’s are on him, tracking the motion of his tongue over his lips.

 

As if resentful of being caught looking where he shouldn’t, Sam flares up again.  “Besides, he’s my friend, Dean.  Mine.  I’ll do what I want with him.”

Dean shakes his head, frustrated, speechless, the strength of his unease wrapped like a cold hand around his throat.  It’s exactly that that he’s worried about—Sam doing what he wants with Lucas.  But he can’t very well say that.  It makes no sense, none that Dean can articulate.  He just has a feeling…

 

“You have to be careful, Sam.  Lucas might be a victim, but he’s also a stranger.  All I’m asking is that you think before you do anything rash, that’s all.  Try to avoid reckless decisions.”

 

It’s like talking to a stone.  Sam’s shoulders are set, his expression defiant.  He isn’t listening to anything his older brother has to say.

 

“Promise me at least you’ll ask me before you make any decisions where Lucas is concerned.  Please?”

Sam nods grudgingly, a tight little bob of his chin, and then turns back toward the barn.  “Some welcome we’ve given him,” he mutters, throwing it over his shoulder like a gauntlet.

 

Dean refuses to pick it up, pretends he didn’t hear it.  “Water the livestock, Sam.  And make sure you rub down Custer or he’ll stiffen up.”

 

Dean gets only a dismissive wave in response, but he knows Sam will take care of the horse, anyway.  He’s always had a way with animals in direct proportion to the way people cannot seem to abide him. 

 

There’s nothing physically wrong with Sam.  He’s a tall kid, handsome, strong and broad-shouldered now that he’s grown into his height.  He’s smart, can work like a mule when he’s in the right mood, and has never, as far as Dean knows, said a word against anyone or raised the first fist in a fight.

  
But there have been plenty of fights—God only knows how many.  By the time Sam was eight, Dean had grown accustomed to cleaning up the dried blood and stitching up the cuts, getting only one-word answers to his frantic questions about what had happened to cause the fight.

 

People in town were just as tight-lipped, at least around Dean.  He was popular enough, he guessed, though people treated him with the deference of the Reverend’s kin and kept some distance, which was well and good with Dean, who didn’t much care to be too close to others.

 

Growing up out on the prairie far enough from town that even shooting in the street couldn’t be heard on still summer’s nights with the windows wide open and only his little brother and his aging grandfather for company, Dean had learned early the value of keeping his own thoughts, of reading deep of the landscape, of listening to the weather and the way of the growing world.

 

And of course, he read the bible, seeking in it not only all the entertainment a boy could ask—kings and battles, prophets and plagues—but also the word of God, who had answers to all the questions Dean never seemed to be able to answer on his own.

 

Like why his parents had died and his grandfather had been blinded at the same time Sammy had been born.  Or why he sometimes got a strange feeling in his belly, like a worm was turning there, making him weak-kneed and short of breath.  He knew it was wrong, this feeling, that it didn’t belong there, changing the way he looked at his brother.

 

Dean told himself it was the devil’s work and for the second time that day shoved the thoughts from his head as the subject of those thoughts leapt from the second-to-last rail of the ladder to land cat-footed facing Dean.

 

“Alright?”

 

Sam nodded, eyes once again smiling, earlier mood forgotten.  Sam was changeable as the weather on a hot August day—and just as dangerous, Dean sometimes thought.

  
This wasn’t one of those times, though, his brother happy, a laugh at the corners of his lips.  He touched Dean’s shoulder to lead him back out into the sunshine, said in a low voice, “He’s sleeping.  We were up all night, hiding from Barnes.”

 

“How’d you even come across Lucas?” Dean asked, trying to keep judgment out of his voice.

 

“I went to see the show.”

 

“Sam—“ Dean starts, judgment evident. 

 

“No one saw me, Dean.  Your ‘reputation’ is safe.”

 

He nods, not liking the necessity of subterfuge but appreciating his brother’s effort to keep gossip from spreading about the Reverend’s younger grandson.

 

Rumors enough abound about Sam.

 

“Lucas has the last part of the show,” Sam explains, scuffing his feet through the dirt as he walks to the paddock fence, climbing up easily to the top rail and balancing there. Dean keeps his feet on the ground, leans against the post nearest Sam.

 

“I thought at first that he was going to be part of the sharpshooter’s routine, but then they cleared the stage, and it was just Lucas, standing there, eyes closed, head back like he was praying or something.  Barnes called from somewhere behind the curtain, ‘Tell us what you see, Magician,” and Lucas’ eyes flew open and he fixed them on Jesse Warren and said, ‘I see weak lungs and a bad left eye.’  Jesse sort of started and looked around, frowning like he does.” 

 

Sam pauses in his story to pull a face, and Dean can’t help but laugh.  Damned if it isn’t ol’ One-Eye Warren sitting right there.

 

“Then he said, ‘Damned ye for a liar, but you been talkin’ to someun about me.’

 

Lucas just goes on looking around, pausing here and there on this or that one, and then fixes his eyes on Mrs. Beddoes.  ‘Gout,’ he says, ‘And a touch of the rheumatism.’ She about fainted dead away.  He went on like that for two or three more, and then his eyes sort of strayed to me, though I was off to the side behind one of their painted wagons.  ‘Headaches,’ he said, ‘And night terrors.’  Then he paused and put a hand to his head like he might drop on the spot.  Barnes came blustering up, pushed Lucas toward the back curtain, and held up a bottle of his patent medicine.  ‘This’ll cure all that ails you, as the Magician has spoken it.’”

 

Sam stops, preoccupied with picking a sliver of wood loose from the top rail, and Dean has to keep from telling him to get on with it.  Sam doesn’t like being pushed, and Dean knows he’ll finish when he’s ready.

 

“I was getting ready to leave before the action broke up when I heard a low whistle coming from inside the wagon. I loosened a side flap and stuck my head in and saw him chained up.  I couldn’t leave him like that, Dean.  It wouldn’ta been Christian-like.”

 

Dean grits his teeth and doesn’t bite at the bait his brother’s dangling.  Sam likes to use religion to rile Dean, to get him going about God and the devil.  The disrespect bothers Dean, makes him both angry at and frightened for his brother, gives him visions of Sam burning in hell for his unbelieving.

 

“So I got him free, and we hid in town until the early morning, when things got quiet.  They raised an alarm at the Show camp, but we gave ‘em the slip.  Took cover in the livery until everyone went on, snuck Custer out the back door when Remus fell to snoring.”

 

Remus Wettingen, who kept the smithy and livery in Sweetbranch, liked his liquor as much as he disliked horses.  Any given week he was losing this animal or that, usually borrowed by some boy out for a lark.  It wasn’t hard to fool him, anyway, not on a Saturday night.

 

“Got any idea what I can say to keep Lucas with me if Barnes and his men come for him?”

 

A sly smile turns the corners of Sam’s mouth.  “Sweet tongue like yours ought to be able to tell ‘em whatever they most need to hear, I suspect.”

 

Dean squints against the sun haloing his brother and casting Sam’s face into shadow, trying to make out exactly what his brother means by that remark.  Fact is, there’s something in the tone that makes Dean want to walk away, go someplace cool and quiet and dark, where he can shake off the snaky feeling in his belly.

 

Instead, he smirks and says, “Reckon I’ve got a few things I can say to a sinner such as Mr. Barnes.  But that’s not what I mean, and you know it.”

 

Sam nods, sun peeking from behind his head as he dips his chin and considers the dusty grass growing at the edge of the paddock.

 

“I guess you could say that if Barnes wants Lucas back, he can go to the Sheriff and explain to Bud Grady how it is that he got him in the first place.”

 

“And I guess you know something about that?”  Dean narrows his eyes.

 

Another nod.  “Lucas has a gift of Sight himself, powerful strong, stronger ‘n mine by miles.  He can see what’s wrong with people—not just their sickness but what’s inside of ‘em, here.”  Sam points to his chest with his finger.  “And here.”  Temple.  “And…” A comprehensive wave takes in everything below the belt.  “There.”

 

“You saying we can blackmail Barnes with his own…sickness?”

 

Sam nods.  “Not only what he’s done to Lucas, but where he got him.  Lucas was kidnapped from his family in KC long about two years ago now.  Barnes figured his parents wouldn’t come looking on account of they’re immigrants from Russia.  But Lucas says his father must be looking for him.  Says he’s got a passel of family, and not a one of ‘em will rest until he’s found.”

 

“Seems like he should have been found before now, in that case,” Dean observes, something about the boy’s story not ringing true.

 

Sam shrugs.  “Lucas says his folks don’t speak much English and didn’t have any way of getting around.  My guess is, though, they’ll be mighty glad to have him back.”

 

“So that’s your plan?  Get Lucas back to Kansas City?  And just how do you intend to go about doing that, Sam?”

 

Another shrug.  “I’ll figure a way to get him there.”

 

Dean hears the lie back in his brother’s voice, the one that says Sam intends to go with Lucas, not just put him on a train or some such, but Dean leaves it, too tired by half to go chasing after trouble when he’s got plenty on his plate already.

 

“What’s Lucas’ last name?”

 

“Volkov,” Sam answers promptly, like he’s practiced it.  He even says it with a little lilt, like he’s heard it in someone else’s accent enough to know its special sound.

  
It irritates Dean, makes him want to say, “Speak English,” but he holds his tongue.

 

“Alright.  When they get here, you let me do the talking, and make sure you tell Lucas to keep out of sight.  No need to tempt the man to further sinning.”

 

Sam snorts, an inelegant, filthy sound.  Dean ignores it in favor of pushing himself off the fence post and dusting his hands on his dungarees.  “I’ve got to get some supper on.  You take care of the animals?”

 

“I will.”

 

“Come right in when you’re done.  You can bring a plate out to Lucas after supper.”

 

“Yessir,” Sam answers as he jumps clear of the paddock fence and starts walking toward the barn.  If there’s a note of mocking in his voice, Dean pretends not to hear it.

 

*****

 

The cloud of dust a mile off as the crow flies could be a troubled soul coming for counsel or one of their congregation paying a late Sunday visit with his fiddle or his guitar, to play in the dark and drive away the devil with holy song.

 

Dean’s pretty sure it’s Barnes and his posse, though, so he’s waiting on the porch, shotgun propped out of sight behind a post, eyes shaded by his everyday hat and hands at his sides in clear, unprovocative view of the four men who come tearing up the lane, dragging tattered banners of dust behind them as they ride and dirtying up the sunset.

 

“What can I do for you gentlemen?” Dean asks, wearing his Sunday smile.

 

“You got something that belongs to me, boy, and I want it back,” growls a greasy-faced fat man holding his horse down with his belly over the saddlehorn.

“I’m afraid you’ve wasted a trip, Mr.—“ Dean lets it hang there, like he has no idea in the world who it is that’s addressing him so rudely.

 

“You know damned well who I am, boy.  And you know what I’ve come for.  Don’t mess around with me, or the boys here’ll take your place apart, and they won’t be careful about it, neither.”

 

Dean lets his eyes drift to the three men sitting in the big man’s shadow.  He picks out the sharpshooter by the pearl handle of his revolver, tells the skinners by the way they grip the reins.  He allows his eyes to linger long enough to let them know he’s looking, long enough, in fact, to be considered rude in civilized company.

  
Manners aren’t something he has to worry about here, though.

 

“As I said, sir, you have me at a disadvantage.  Not knowing who you are, I can hardly tell what it is you expect to find.  If you’ve come for the Lord’s word or a chance at salvation, though, then I can surely be of help.”

 

One of the men, the lean one with the pretty gun, snorts and ducks his hat brim with his hand, as if to hide his amusement.  The big man silences him with a killing glance.

 

“I’m Willy Baxter Barnes, proprietor of the Barnes Travelling Medicine Show, and I’m looking for my apprentice, Lucas, who was last seen in the company of your brother, Samuel Winchester.  That clear it up for you, padre?”

 

“Oh, I’m not a minister yet, Mr. Barnes, and I’ll never be a Papist, but I appreciate the compliment.  It’s as I feared all along.  I can’t help you.  I haven’t seen your apprentice.  And for the record, it’s not in my brother’s character to bring home lost lambs.  That’s more my line of work, if you see what I mean?”

 

Dean chuckles at his own joke, an empty sound in the tense twilight.  “If Samuel had brought home a stray from the flock, I’d have had to check it for a brand that established ownership and then see to it that its wounds were cleansed and its hunger sated.  And I’d want to be sure that no harm came to it thereafter, keep it safe from the wolves that come in the night and try to destroy its pure, white innocence.”

 

Maybe he’s laid the imagery on a little thick, Dean thinks, given the strained silence that reigns in the wake of his sermonizing.

  
But then Barnes looses an ugly laugh, something between hawking a stream of chaw and sneering at someone else’s expense.  “You got it all wrong, boy.  I ain’t the wolf ‘tall.  In fact, if it weren’t for the considerable trouble it’d cause me to have to replace him, I’d leave the damned boy with you just to see what’d happen when you let him lie down in your fold.  As it is, though, I need him back.”

 

“That’s unfortunate for you, Mr. Barnes.”  Dean lets his distaste for the man’s implications color his tone.  “Because I haven’t seen him, I don’t have him, and I’m getting a little tired of your assertions to the contrary.  Now, if you’d kindly get off my property, I won’t have to send to town for the sheriff and report you for trespassing.  Sheriff’s a member of our little church, you know.  Good man.  God-fearing.  Doesn’t have much patience for sinners, bless him.  Tends to jail ‘em first and ask for their confessions after the fact.  His job is justice, after all, not mercy.”

 

“That’s the way it’s gonna be, then?”  Barnes says it softly, menacing and intent, but Dean can’t help but notice the way the skinners have drawn their horses back a few steps, the way the sharpshooter is turned in his saddle, as if his body is already back on the road to town, only waiting for his hands to catch up.

 

“If you come back here, Mr. Barnes, you’d best bring Sheriff Grady with you.  I’m sure he’d be glad to hear all about your ‘apprentice.’”

 

Barnes gives another of his hacking laughs and turns his horse’s head sharply, so that the horse tosses its head at the force of the bit driving into its mouth.  He gives it his heels viciously and the horse crow-kicks into motion, shoving the ersatz posse out of the way as he thunders back up the lane.  The sharpshooter and the two skinners follow at a considerably less urgent pace, and Dean lets out a laugh more nerves than joy.

 

“You think he’ll be back?” Sam’s voice drifts to him from inside the screen door.

 

Dean shakes his head, contemplating the edge of the porch step as it darkens in the growing shadow of night.

 

“I think we’re clear for now.  But you’ll have to be careful, Sam, at least until Barnes leaves town.  I think you should stick close to home.  And don’t let anyone see Lucas.”

 

“I won’t.”  Sam sounds almost childlike, his voice clear of the sullenness it’s been marked with for months now, it seems.  “And Dean?”

 

“Yeah, Sammy?”

 

“Thanks.”

 

“No need for that, Sam.  I’m only doing the Lord’s work, after all.”

 

“Yeah,” Sam says, every trace of the child gone from him now.  “Guess you’ll have a greater reward than anything I could give you.”

 

When Dean opens the screen door, Sam’s already gone, like he was a voice in the darkness and no body at all, leaving him only with an impression of deep uneasiness and a cold finger down the knobs of his spine.

 

*****

 

Sam doesn’t come to bed, and Dean spends half the night waiting to hear his brother climbing the stairs. 

 

As a consequence, he’s ornerier than usual when he slides into his muck boots to head out to the barn to feed and water and gather eggs for breakfast—jobs Sam himself is supposed to be doing.

 

So when the first face he sees is Sam’s, peering at him through the dim, mote-addled air from the loft where Lucas spent the night, Dean can’t seem to control the words that come from him nor the tone in which he says them.

 

“Well, at least Pawpa doesn’t have to worry about you tom-catting in town anymore.” 

 

He sees the moment Sam gets his meaning by the way his shoulders stiffen, his face following suit, going stony and hard-eyed.  “Guess that’s a comfort to you.”

 

It’s not confirmation of what Dean suspects—Dean’s not sure exactly what he suspects, truth be told.  But there’s an ugly something gnawing at his insides, and he can’t help but want to draw it out any way he can.

 

“What would be a comfort is if you’d remember someone other than yourself now and then,” Dean barks, dropping the well bucket with a thud and slamming open the grain bin lid.  “This is your job.  Get your slothful, lecherous body down here and do your chores.”

 

He turns away, storms out without looking back, not even waiting to hear Sam climbing down the ladder.

 

His ungentle attitude is unappreciated by the hens, who cluck and batter him with their wings as he moves them roughly aside to get at their still-warm eggs, earning not a few scratches and peck-marks for his efforts.

 

When he approaches the porch, Rufus doesn’t peek out from beneath it or huff up to him begging for breakfast, and Dean whistles a couple of times, calls him by name.  Nothing.

 

“Huh,” Dean mutters to himself.  It isn’t like the old dog to stray far.

 

Back inside, he sets the egg basket on the dry sink and takes off his boots, padding into Grandfather’s bedroom in his stockinged feet.

 

Pawpa’s room faces east, and pale fingers of early sun fall across his hands where they lay flat on the blankets over his chest.  The skin is thin, almost transparent, the blue veins like worms already having their way with his quick flesh.  Dean shivers and steps into the room, eyes fixed to his Pawpa’s chest, searching for movement.

  
When Grandfather takes a snorting breath and shifts a little in his sleep, Dean almost jumps out of his skin.  He lets out a long breath of relief and comes ahead.

 

“Pawpa.  Breakfast.”

 

As he always does, Grandfather opens his sightless eyes and says, “Praise the Lord.”  It’s the short form of longer morning prayers he used to say on his knees beside the bed, against the hard wood of the cold floor.  But that was before, when Pawpa could get up and down on his own.  Now, he settles for sitting with his feet hanging over the edge of the bed, his hands folded and eyes closed for the space of several minutes of silent prayer.

  
Most days, Dean joins him, but today he’s too restless to sit in the silence.  He leaves Grandfather’s slippers on the floor, his robe on the mattress beside him, and goes back out to the kitchen to start breakfast.

 

The hard-won eggs popping and sizzling in the pan, bread toasting over the burner, Dean sets the table with his grandmother’s plates, their simple rose pattern blurred and chipped from long use and the abuse of a household of men.  Grandmother didn’t make the journey with them to Sweetbranch in 1881.  Grandfather had only ever said that she’d been “sickly,” but Dean has had cause to wonder.  Though his Pawpa still wears the plain gold band on his left hand, he had never, as far as Dean knew, gotten so much as a telegram from his wife after they’d moved here.

 

Still, she’d sent her plates and linens, the gold-rimmed, fine-stemmed glasses Grandfather keeps in the high cupboard and has never used, framed prints from Currier and Ives, colorful quilts sown with skill and love.  This is all Dean knows of the woman his Pawpa loved and the most exposure he has to a woman’s touch.

  
Of his mother, there’s nothing in the house at all, save a wooden chest of baby clothes and tiny shoes, mementoes of his earliest days, stored in cedar shavings in the half-attic at the back of the house.

 

His father, on the other hand, seems to be everywhere, from the messy black scrawl of Dean’s own name at the front of the family bible to a pair of boots, toes curling with dry rot, sitting in the front hall where they’ve been for as long as Dean can remember.  There’s a scarred leather barn coat on a hook in the same hall and a set of rusty spurs on a nail in the barn. 

 

Though Dean would never accuse his Pawpa of being sentimental, he knows there’s something in his refusal to clear out these objects so much a part of the household that they’re almost overlooked, something more than the behavior of a blind man no longer able to see them himself.

  
When he was small, maybe seven or eight, Dean had dared to slide his feet into his father’s boots.  Pawpa had caught him at it, had known without having to ask what it was that his grandson was doing in the front hall.  The look on Pawpa’s face had been haunted, an expression Dean, as a little boy, hadn’t been able to decipher. 

  
Still, his mind comes back to that look now, and he knows what it is, at least a little:  Unbearable grief and another feeling, like Grandfather’s seen his doom and it is upon him.  Not for the first or even the first hundredth time, Dean wonders what fate Grandfather had imagined when he remembered his son’s death all those years before.

 

The shuffling of Grandfather’s slippered feet brings Dean out of his memories, and he notices the toast is singeing just as Pawpa says, “Something’s burning.”

 

He rescues most of the slices, flips the eggs over hard, the way Pawpa likes them, and goes to the door to stick his head out and holler for Sam.

 

Given the way he’d left things earlier, Dean’s expecting a battle at the table.  Sam’s talent for baiting their Pawpa is rivaled only by his stubbornness about always having the last word.  Since that adamantine trait is genetic, it makes for some truly terrible mealtimes.

 

He’s relieved, therefore, to see that Sullen Sam has arrived, and though Dean usually finds this brooding version of his brother annoying in his own right, he’s willing to take it today if only for the sake of their Grandfather’s health.

 

They’ve almost cleaned their plates when Grandfather asks, as he often does, “Samuel, have you come to the Lord today?”

 

Breakfast tasteless on his tongue, Dean turns his eyes slowly to his younger brother, whose face is a mask of indifference.  In his eyes, though, Dean can see the anger like a banked fire.  He wills Sam to keep quiet, to be polite. To remember they have a reason to keep on Grandfather’s good side, and that reason’s breakfast is congealing in the skillet on the stove.

 

“No, sir,” Sam answers, voice low and tight.  Dean hopes that’s the end of it.

 

“Do you expect salvation to come to you, then?  Or is it that the devil has promised you some greater reward?”

 

Dean jumps at the echo of Sam’s words the night before, eyes flying to his Grandfather’s stern face.  Is it possible he heard Sam?  Can he know what they were talking about?

 

Impossible.  Even Dean isn’t sure what Sam’s cryptic remark had been about.

 

“I expect I’ll get what’s coming to me, sir,” Sam answers, the evenness of his tone belying the shaking of his hands.  He’s furious, trembling with it.

 

Dean intervenes, “I think what Sam means, sir—“

 

“Don’t speak for your brother, Dean.  If he’s man enough to spread his seed recklessly on whatever harlot’s willing to part her lying legs, he’s man enough to answer for his sins when I ask after them.”

 

Sam’s fork hits the plate with a clatter and he shoves his chair away from the table, asking permission to be excused from between clenched teeth.

  
“No one can excuse you but the Lord, boy, and He won’t do it unless you ask.”

 

 “It’ll be a cold day in hell before I go begging after your God,” Sam spits, storming to the screen door and flinging it open hard enough that it strains the hinges.  The top hinge whines and jumps, the door returning with a wounded shriek to bang and settle at a drunken angle against the frame.

 

“He’s got the fires of hell burning inside of him,” Grandfather notes, tone sepulchral.

 

Dean doesn’t know what to say, suddenly out of soothing words.  Sam’s angry, sure, has been for a long time.  He doesn’t like the isolation of the farm, doesn’t like the way people in town act around him.  He knows Sam dreams of a big city where he can go to be himself, someone other than the Reverend Winchester’s strange younger grandson.

 

But the fires of hell?  Dean doesn’t think so.  He knows something of the heat of the Devil’s hand, knows how it burns in his belly when he awakens from blushing dreams.  Surely that’s not what’s afflicting Sam.

  
Then he remembers Sam’s sleep-tousled hair this morning and the odd look on his face when he stared down at Dean from the barn loft.  Remembers his own hard words to his brother.

 

A sudden chill drives Dean up from his chair to clear the plates and get Grandfather settled in the parlor before he fixes a fourth plate in secret and sets it aside.  He pumps water into the sink, sets soapy rag to the plates, makes short work of clean-up, wishing for once that the usually soothing, automatic nature of the task didn’t give him so much time to think.

  
He doesn’t want to think about Sam and Lucas.  Doesn’t want to consider the possibilities of Sam’s words the night before, of the taunting way he said, ‘Reward’ and the way Sam’s words had made him feel.

“Damnit,” he whispers, drying the last fork and putting it away.  Mondays, Dean usually works for Emmett Bradley at his dry goods store in town.  Bradley pays Dean to do the heavy lifting, to stock shelves and keep the store room in order, to wait on customers now and again when Bradley himself needs a break.  It’s a little extra money for the family, and Dean doesn’t mind the work.

 

Today, though, he’s reluctant to change into his better pants and his crisp white shirt, and he finds his hands trembling as he tries to adjust his tie.  He doesn’t want to leave Sam and Lucas alone here with Pawpa, but Dean can’t shirk his duty.  He needs the work, for one thing.  For another, if the reliable Dean Winchester failed to show up at Bradley’s, tongues would wag, and the last thing they need right now is more speculation about the Winchesters.

 

So he finishes getting ready and heads out to the barn, tin plate full of cold breakfast in his hand.

 

“Sam,” he calls as he enters the barn. 

 

Nothing.

 

“Sam,” he tries again, louder. 

 

There’s an ominous quality to the silence, as of a pent breath held against discovery.

 

“Sam, I’ve got breakfast for your friend.”

 

This brings a scuffle from overhead, and the friend himself appears, face so like Sam’s earlier expression that Dean almost mistakes him for his brother.

 

Lucas swings a lanky leg over the top of the ladder and climbs down quickly, leaping from the second to last rung and landing with a familiar grace.

 

He approaches Dean cautiously, like Dean might strike him with the hand that’s not holding the plate, and Dean tries to smile encouragingly.

 

“I’m sorry it’s cold,” he says.  Lucas’ dark eyes regard him solemnly, fear gone as he reaches out to take the proffered food.

 

“Thank you,” the boy answers, smiling a little, eyes tracking with ravenous intent to the plate before coming back up to meet Dean’s.  “Sam’s not here.  He came through the barn and headed out that way.”

 

Lucas gestures out the back, to where the hay-loading doors have been flung apart to reveal a vast expanse of prairie stretching out to the horizon, a hard black line away to the south.

 

Dean nods, not wanting to volunteer an explanation for his brother’s behavior, but he doesn’t have to.

 

“He’s angry with your Grandfather,” Lucas observes.  “And with you,” he adds, eyes challenging now, holding Dean’s startled look.

 

“Sam’s always angry,” Dean manages at last, biting back a dozen things he could have said instead about uninvited guests.

 

Lucas nods.  “He burns.”

It’s figurative, sure, and cryptic, but Dean can’t help but think how it echoes Grandfather’s earlier accusation.

 

“What are you talking about?” he asks, harsher than he’d intended, but if Lucas minds, he doesn’t show it.

 

With deliberate care, Lucas begins to eat, balancing the plate on one long-fingered hand and slicing the egg with the edge of the fork.  He eats without looking at Dean, talks between mouthfuls.

 

“Sam wants things he thinks he can’t have.  But you know he can, Dean.  And if you’d only give him what he wants, he’d be happier.  He’d stay.”

 

Who does this boy think he is, lecturing Dean on what his little brother needs?  He’s been caring for Sam since he was just a kid himself, since Sam was a squalling bundle of need in his arms.  This sloe-eyed foreigner can’t tell Dean a thing he doesn’t already know about Sam.

 

He says as much, and in mid-growl Lucas’ lips start to turn up at the edges.  A slow, knowing smile creeps across his lips, which glisten with grease from the eggs he’s just finished.

 

“You want the same thing, Dean.”

 

“What?  _What_ do I want?” he demands, clenching and unclenching his fists, suddenly afraid of the answer even as he goads the boy into giving it.

 

But Lucas says nothing, his sly smile widening it into a wolfish grin, eyes glittering with humor that is neither innocent nor boyish.

 

Plate empty, he holds it out to Dean, who’s tempted to take it from Lucas only to fling it back in the boy’s smug face.  Instead, he just says, “Don’t leave the barn,” to which Lucas replies with a nod, suiting action to gesture by turning back to the ladder and climbing up it with a fluid grace that Dean finds unsettling.

 

*****

 

Lucas’ words hound Dean as he tacks up Custer, rides him the two miles into town, and leaves him with Remus at the livery.  Emmett greets him with a harried smile as he helps Emma and Rebecca Alderson look at bolts of cloth.  Dean gets right to work, grateful for the distraction of filling grain barrels, stacking cans, and restocking the apothecary corner with Dr. Driscoll’s Home Cure and Mrs. Kelton’s Ladies’ Elixir. 

 

The stockroom is its usual cluttered mess, only put to rights when Dean is in the shop, so he doesn’t know that Willy Baxter Barnes has come in until he hears the man’s unctuous voice.  He’s obviously trying to sell Emmett a case of his own “proprietary blend” of patent medicine, and Dean listens, lip curling up with distaste, as the confidence man puts Emmett through all the paces.

  
“Well, we’re off in a day or two, so don’t wait too long to order, now,” Barnes at long last admonishes.  “You can keep this bottle as a sample, but be sure to follow the doctor’s instructions on the label.  It’s powerful medicine.”

 

Bradley’s answer is indistinct, but it must do the trick because after a few slick compliments about Bradley’s “establishment,” Barnes leaves.

 

Emmett slumps in the doorway to the storeroom and gives Dean a tired look.  “I thought he’d never leave.”

 

“You aren’t going to buy any, are you?” Dean asks, making his opinion clear in his tone.

 

“No sir,” Emmett answers at once.  “I’d be a fool to tangle with the likes of him.”  Emmett pushes upright and turns to go back to the counter out front.  He pauses, though, face in profile, and adds, “That’s advice you’d do well to listen to yourself, Dean.”

 

Dean looks up, too startled for a moment to answer, and by the time he can formulate a response, Emmett has disappeared back into the shop.

 

What did Emmett mean?  What has he heard?  The questions make a constant refrain in his head, counterpoint to the painful beating of his heart, kicked up by worry, and when the day finally starts its inevitable close, Dean’s left with a cotton mouth and sweaty hands, nerves like fence wire strung taut and humming in a twister wind.

 

If on the ride home the sunset sky seems to lower over him, the wind shoving up against him like rude hands, Dean can’t be bothered to notice.  In fact, if it weren’t for Custer’s long-suffering sense of homing, Dean might have missed the lane altogether.

 

Lights in the kitchen and parlor greet him, cheering the gloomy grey of early evening and pushing back against the darkness that’s taken over his thoughts.

 

There’s a light on in the barn, too, and Sam is waiting to take Custer, unsaddle him, rub him down and feed him.  “I made dinner and left some on the stove for you,” he adds, giving Dean an uncertain smile that cuts through the last misgivings that had clung to him when he saw his home waiting.

 

“Thanks, Sam,” he says, meaning it, and on impulse, he claps a hand to Sam’s shoulder and clutches, letting his grip linger, surprised by the strength and solidity of his brother’s back, caught, too, by Sam’s sudden stillness beneath his hand.

 

“Dean,” Sam breathes, but a noise overhead brings both of their heads up, Dean’s hand dropping from his brother like he’s been singed.

 

Lucas pauses at the top of the loft ladder, mouth indifferent but eyes dancing with something Dean can’t quite read in the feeble light of the oil lamp.

 

“You coming in?” he asks, trying to sound like he doesn’t care.

 

“Yeah,” Sam answers, voice empty as an erased slate, all the earlier meanings blurred away.

 

“Don’t be long,” Dean answers, just to have something to say.  He kicks himself at once for making it sound like an order.

  
“Yessir,” is Sam’s predictable—and predictably mocking—reply.

 

Sighing, Dean heads back out into the twilight, grateful that Grandfather’s already asleep in his bed when Dean checks on him.  He was about at his limit of challenging conversations for the day.

 

He hopes that tonight Sam doesn’t talk in his sleep.  Dean hopes, too, that if his little brother does, Dean himself is strong enough not to answer.

 

*****

 

For a few days, there’s a kind of biding ease, deceptive like the weather in summer sometimes gets, when the hard sun gentles and there come soft, greening rains.  Dean knows it won’t last, knows that beneath the sweetness there’s storm-wind breeding, but he pretends otherwise, and they get along fine.

 

The only off note is Rufus’ disappearance, the dog never having come back from wherever it had gotten to Sunday night.

 

“Probably went off somewhere to die,” Sam offers unsentimentally.  He’d never been particularly warm to animals.  Dean feels the dog’s absence, though, and can’t help but be uneasy about the old pet.

 

Otherwise, they fall into a new routine as if they’ve always had a stranger in the barn.  Dean fixes extra at mealtime, keeps it warm on the stove until they’ve finished eating, when Sam trots it out to Lucas and keeps him company while he eats to return to the house later with a plate licked so clean it hardly needs washing. 

 

Sam does his chores without being asked, sometimes taking other work upon himself with a little half-smile that Dean chooses to believe means his brother is happy with being farm-bound.  It’s not safe to go into town while Barnes’ show is still there.

 

That the smile might be because Sam’s got company other than his own, Dean chooses to ignore that, too.

 

Anyway, Sam sleeps in his own bed at night, the familiar rhythm of his breathing lulling Dean out of worry, helping him forget for awhile that his brother has changed, that Lucas has put a light in Sam’s eyes that Dean’s never seen before.

  
Thursday, though, the very day the medicine show leaves Sweetbranch headed west, passing the Winchester farm in a dust-dragging train—well, that evening, sunset purples the sky like it’s been horse-kicked, painting everything in a smudged red like the sun has set the prairie on fire. 

 

Sam meets him at the barn door, where he’d been polishing the tack, eyes strange with the eerie light, lips curled in an expression Dean can’t place—not mirth, exactly, nor slyness.  Something knowing, like he’s eaten of the forbidden fruit.

 

Sam’s eyes raise a shiver in Dean, and to hide the reaction, Dean gruffs, “Took you long enough to get around to that,” nodding at the oily rag in Sam’s right hand.

 

They’re the first harsh words they’ve shared since Monday, and Dean hates himself as soon as they leave his mouth, but he can’t take them back, and he watches, helpless, as Sam’s hand clenches around the rag and his eyes shutter up.

 

“Sam—“ he starts, unsure how to apologize for being wrong-footed, feeling foolish and resentful all at once, a little sick to his stomach like a nest of snakes are writhing around inside of him.

 

“I’ll clean up,” Sam says, toneless, and Dean breathes out hard through his nose and turns on his heel.

 

“You shouldn’t talk to him like that,” a smooth voice says from the shadows just inside the barn door.

 

Dean turns back to see two glittering eyes, expression inscrutable, peering at him out of the dark.

 

“He loves you,” Lucas continues as Dean flounders for something at all to say.  He’s consumed with a sudden need to hurt this stranger, a need he controls only with greater effort than he cares to consider.

 

 _Wrath is a sin_ , he reminds himself, taking a long, deep breath and holding it.

 

“He needs you to love him back.” 

 

The boy is relentless, a motionless volition in the dark, wanting something from Dean that Dean cannot name, never mind give.

 

Dean takes a step away from him, whispers out loud, “What are you?” before he even realizes he’s got the words in mind to say.

 

Lucas’ laugh follows him, carried on the bloodied air as Dean retreats, unaware that he’s humming _Come the Rapture_ in minor keys until Grandfather says, from his place at the kitchen table, “Doom’s coming.”

 

*****

 

Dinner has all the promise of a yellow sky in August, and Dean braces himself for a fight, knowing it’s his fault Sam’s brought storm clouds in with him.

 

But Sam surprises him, keeping quiet, only the hard set of his chin giving away his brother’s feelings.  Grandfather seems tired, pushing the pork around on his plate, ignoring the potatoes in favor of taking long draughts of cold pump water, prompting Dean to refill his glass twice.

 

Dean gives him an anxious look, startled by his pale cheeks and the smoky hollows of his broad-cheeked face, offsetting the jaundiced yellow of his eyes so that for a startled moment, Dean doesn’t recognize him.

 

Then he coughs, splattering his chin with half-chewed pork, a cough that turns hacking and then to a desperate wheeze.  Dean’s out of his seat, patting him on the back, saying, “You alright?  Pawpa?”

 

At last, after an eternity of gasping breaths, Grandfather lifts a trembling hand to wipe his chin clear and then says in a voice like a spade breaking hard ground, “Help me up.”

 

Dean spares a glance for Sam as he’s levering the old man up, sees his brother’s face like the mask a bandit might wear, showing nothing of what he thinks or feels, only the eyes alive with a kind of cold knowing, and then they’re turning away from the table.

 

“Chair,” Grandfather manages, and Dean guides him there despite his instinct to put the old man right to bed. He’d have argued with his Pawpa except for the fear that the stubborn preacher wouldn’t have argued back, a sure sign that things have turned grave.

 

When he returns to the kitchen, his food has gone as cold as the lead weight in his belly.  Dean scrapes what’s left of his and Pawpa’s dinners into a bowl for Rufus before remembering that the dog is gone, and then fixes up a new plate for Lucas, all under the careful, neutral stare of his brother.

Finally, Dean cannot stand the silence.  He puts the plate down too hard on the dry sink, hears the telltale chink of a piece chipping off.

 

“What’s the matter with you, Sam?” he asks, trying to keep his voice low, whether because he’s afraid Grandfather’s sleeping or fearful that he’s not, Dean’s unsure.

 

“What do you mean, Dean?” Sam asks in a perfectly bland voice.  His eyes aren’t bland, though.  They simmer like ball lightning on the horizon, an ugly glow promising sorrow.

 

“I mean, why are you acting like you don’t care that Pawpa’s—“  For all that he thinks he’s prepared for it, for all that he knows he should be glad of it for the end it means to his grandfather’s suffering, Dean can’t say the word.

 

Sam has no trouble.  “Dying?”  He shrugs elaborately.  “Why should I care?  All he ever does is talk to me about hellfire and damnation, Dean.  He doesn’t love me.  He’s never loved me.  You’re the one he loves.  His good little Christian soldier, marching onward.”

 

His tone knocks the wind out of Dean and he feels heat prickle behind his eyes.  He doesn’t know the boy sitting at the worn kitchen table, doesn’t recognize him for all that he’s wearing Dean’s hand-me-down flannel. 

 

 _We’ve got to get that thing out of our barn_ , Dean thinks.  And as if he’s said it out loud, Sam laughs, an awful sound, like it’s coming from a great distance below ground.

 

“You think it’s Lucas who’s made me talk like this?  He’s been here five days, Dean.  He hasn’t done a damned thing except help me to see things more clearly.  And see a lot _more_ things…”

 

The way he says the last part makes Dean’s heart beat faster, pushing it into his ears with a dizzying rush.  He’s glad he’s leaning against the sink because the floor seems to tilt and sway under his feet.

 

“What do you mean?” he asks, and he hardly recognizes his own voice.

 

“I mean that the Lord’s hand is upon me,” Sam mocks, taking on the cadence of their grandfather at his pulpit.  Then he drops it as abruptly as he put it on and says in a quite different tone, matter of fact and proud, “The Sight is getting stronger.  Lucas has shown me how to See better and more.”

 

“Like what?” Dean had meant to admonish his brother, warn him against the temptations of the devil, but his fascination wins out.

 

“Like that Emmett Bradley is a horny old goat.  Spends every Saturday night with little Lula Mae at Miss Lizzy’s.”

 

Dean ignores the illicit thrill that shoots through him at the mention of the notorious house of ill repute out on the prairie to the other side of Sweetbranch, and fastens instead on the shame heating up his cheeks.  “You shouldn’t bear false witness nor listen to gossip, Sam,” Dean says, clinging to his convictions against the wave of feeling rolling over him.  He wants to know more, but he’s afraid. 

 

Afraid to ask.  Afraid Sam will answer.

 

Afraid of what he’ll be tempted to do with what he hears.

“I haven’t been to town to hear any gossip, Dean.  That bit came to me in a dream I had.  Just last night, in fact.  Don’t you remember?”

 

Dean starts to shake his head, to assure Sam that they both slept through the night.  And then he does remember.

 

Sam muttering in his sleep, head tossing, eyes open and unseeing when Dean turned his head on his own pillow to take his brother in.  Even from across the narrow, slant-roofed room, Dean had been able to make out Sam’s face, had thought at the time that that’s what the shepherds must have looked like when the angel of the Lord came upon them to announce their Savior’s birth.

 

 _Ecstasy and rapture_ , he remembers.

 

Sam snorts.  “None of that bible stuff, Dean,” he says, which is when Dean realizes he’d been talking to himself.  “Leastways,” Sam pauses, as if thinking hard, “I don’t think it comes from the Lord.”

 

“Then it’s the devil’s work,” Dean asserts, happy to be on firmer ground.

 

Sam snorts again, shaking his head, a twisted smile rucking up his lips.

 

“Ain’t the devil, neither, Dean.  Just me.  Just the gift I got from Granddaddy.  The only thing he gave me worth a damn.”

 

“Don’t talk about him like that under his own roof, Samuel,” Dean barks, pushing away from the sink, hands clenching convulsively.  “He raised you from a baby.”

 

“ _You_ raised me, Dean, not him.  Grandfather spent most of his time judging me and finding me wanting, and you know it.”

 

“If you don’t have anything good to say, say nothing at all.”  It’s stupid and heavy-handed, but Dean is still reeling from his brother’s revelation and despairs of saying anything worthwhile.  Some preacher he’d make.

 

“Oh, I’ve got plenty of _good_ things to say, Dean.  Bradley isn’t the only one whose sins have become known.”

 

It’s disturbing how easy it is for Sam to work in the language of the bible, and Dean has a hysterical moment of clarity about the devil quoting scripture before he remembers this is his little brother talking.

 

“This isn’t you,” he says.  “That…boy…out there has put things in your head, Sam.  You’d never be saying any of these things if he hadn’t put you up to it.”

 

That finally gets Sam out of his seat, and as if he’d never seen his brother before, Dean realizes that Sam is almost his height, a discovery easy to make when his brother has closed the narrow space between them and is crowding into him, heaving chest almost brushing Dean’s arms where they’re crossed over his own.

 

“When are you going to get it into your head that I don’t need anyone telling me who I am, Dean?”  Sam’s teeth are clenched, but that doesn’t stop his spittle from showering Dean’s cheek and lips.  It takes everything Dean has not to lick them clean. 

Then Sam’s taking a step back, arms going wide, voice low and strong, “This is who I am, Dean.  Take a look.  I’m not little Sammy anymore.  I’m not the preacher’s freak of a grandson.  I’m a man who’s come into his own, Dean, and I intend to take what’s mine.”

 

Dean hasn’t a notion what Sam is going on about, partly because he’s been transfixed by the realization that his brother _has_ grown up and is no longer the little kid Dean has always persisted in perceiving him to be, no matter his height or the breadth of his shoulders.

 

Partly, Dean’s distraction comes from bewilderment, too.  Not only is this man before him almost a stranger in appearance, but he’s speaking nonsense, words that Dean can’t process, no matter how hard he tries.

 

For a strange, unbreathing moment, Dean wonders if Sam is speaking in tongues.

 

And then Grandfather says, voice Sunday clear, “Get thee behind me, Satan.”

 

Dean hurries to the parlor but slows as he approaches Grandfather’s chair, afraid of what he might find when he rounds to the front.

 

Pawpa’s eyes stare blindly as always, but the pupils aren’t rolled back and his face seems to have regained some color.

 

“That boy’s got the devil in him, Dean.  You need to drive him out.  Drive out the devil!”

 

For a single, glorious moment, his grandfather’s years recede and in his voice is the vigor of his manhood on the field of battle for the Lord.  His hands are raised with clenched fists, signaling defiance, and his sightless eyes blaze with righteous fire.

 

Then Sam comes into the parlor, and it’s as though Grandfather has been smote from on high.  The strength seems to drain from him, and before Dean’s eyes he shrinks, muscles and sinews withering, bones settling, head palsied on his thin neck, and the breath leaves him in a long stream and he closes his eyes.

 

Dean is frozen in silence, only the mantle clock ticking, ticking, ticking, as he contemplates his grandfather’s still figure, gaze tracking from Pawpa’s body to his brother’s eyes, fixed on Dean, lips quirked in an odd smile.

 

Then he recognizes his duty and falls to his knees, feeling for a heartbeat, hoping for the brush of fusty breath against his cheek.

  
There.  Like a wind-battered bird stricken and stunned on a window ledge, Pawpa’s heart stutters.

 

“Help me get him up,” he says before thinking, before remembering Sam’s face as he entered the room just before his Grandfather collapsed.

 

Then he’s past it, driven by urgency he cannot name to put Grandfather safely to bed, where he can rest and regain his strength.

 

In his head, Dean repeats Psalm 23, clinging for comfort to the old, old words of hope until he remembers that they’re spoken by a man who faces certain death.

They get Grandfather into bed with little effort; he seems to have the bones of a bird, too, light and fragile, and when his shoes are off and his legs tucked under the heavy quilt his unremembered wife made, Dean lets out a shaky breath and rubs a hand over his face, suddenly too tired, almost, to move away out of the dark, dust-heavy room.

  
Resolving to ride to Doc Jennings’ first thing in the morning if Grandfather hasn’t improved, Dean gathers what’s left of his strength.

 

Sam’s in the kitchen when Dean finally gets up the gumption to go looking for him. Lucas’ plate is gone from the stove, so Dean assumes it was delivered.

 

“Think he’ll make it to morning?”  Sam’s tone is forlorn, as if the little boy Dean used to know might still be in there somewhere.

 

“He just needs to rest, Sam.  And for us to stop causing him grief.”

 

Sam nods.  “I’m going back out to the barn to check on Lucas.  His plate was gone when I came back to the kitchen, so he must have come in for it while we were in the parlor.”

 

Dean’s too tired to take in Sam’s explanation.  He waves a hand at the door in dismissal and says, “I’m turning in.”

 

Sam starts toward the door but pauses, one hand on the latch.  “Dean?”

 

Dean looks over his shoulder at his little brother, whose face is mostly shadow where the tall cupboard blocks it from the lamplight.

 

“Yeah, Sam?”

 

“You think we’ll be okay.  I mean…after?”

 

Dean doesn’t want to think about what life with be like without Pawpa, but he guesses it’s about time he did.  He’s wanted to be a preacher for so long, he’d forgotten, maybe, what it would take for him to get there.

 

“I think…some things will change, and some will be just the same.”

 

Sam takes a step back into the room, oil lamp over the sink painting his skin ruddy and yellowing his eyes.  “One thing won’t change,” he says.  Behind him, through the gap in the half-opened door, Dean hears the wind picking up along the lane, kicking dust into devils against the porch steps.

 

“What’s that?” Dean asks, voice almost a whisper, throat suddenly dry.

 

“You’ll always have me, Dean.  And I’ll always have you.”

 

Dean nods convulsively, unable to speak.  Then, as if it’s been squeezed from breath-starved lungs, Dean says, “Always.”

 

For the time it takes his heart to kick hard in his chest, for him to make out Grandfather’s harsh snore from down the hallway to the back room, Dean watches his little brother watching him, feeling as though he’s being sorely tested, though he does not know the challenge.

 

Finally, Pawpa lets out a prodigious groan, and the moment is broken, Sam’s lips tricking back into the familiar smirk, body pivoting again to head out into the dark.

 

Long into the night, as he lies awake trying to sleep, Dean wonders if he passed Sam’s test. 

 

When dawn starts to trace the window frame with uncertain fingers of light, Dean’s awake to see it, but Sam isn’t there.

 

That his brother didn’t return to him seems answer enough to Dean’s wondering.

 

*****

 

Pawpa doesn’t rise the next morning.

 

“I’ve taken to my bed for good, Dean,” Grandfather says.  “I will not rise again until the trumpets sound at the corners of the earth.”

 

His voice surely sounds like Judgment, cold like the tomb and faraway. 

 

“Don’t talk like that now, Pawpa,” Dean fusses, straightening the edge of the quilt and tucking under his grandfather’s crabbed hands.  “You’ll be fine.  It’s just a touch of the catarrh you had in January.  I’m bringing Doc Jennings out as soon as I can ride over, and he’ll tell you just the same.”

 

“Don’t coddle me, boy, I’m dying,” Grandfather avers stoutly, breath ragged but words clear enough.  “And don’t call for Eustace.  It’s a long ride for an old man, and there’s no need.  There’s nothing he can say that we don’t already know.”

 

“But—“

 

“You want to do something for me, Dean?”

 

There’s a strange note in Pawpa’s voice, almost a wheedling, a tone Dean’s only heard his stern grandfather use on ornery animals and little children.  It’s the most disturbing thing he’s heard that morning, which is going some.

 

“I’ll do anything for you, Pawpa.  You know that.”

 

“I know.  You’re a good man, Dean, and you walk in the path of the righteous.  But the path isn’t always clear, even to those who follow the Lord’s light, and I fear you’ll stray, Dean.  I do fear it.”

 

Dean shakes his head, filled all at once with a nameless shame, as if his Grandfather has Seen and Known Dean’s darkest dreams. 

 

“No, Grandfather.  I won’t stray from the Lord’s path.”

 

Grandfather hmphs, head trembling on the greasy pillow, “You will if that brother of yours has anything to do with it.  He’s the devil’s child, conceived in evil.  You’ll need to be stronger than you are to deny his temptations.”

 

Bewildered, Dean stares at his Pawpa’s face, trying to see past the unhealthy pallor, the gibbous eyes and cavernous mouth gaping wide for rattling breath.  Tries to see the man who raised him from his boyhood, who never before spoke out like this about Sam.

 

Judging that it must be the illness taking Pawpa out of his head, Dean says nothing, only waiting, hoping with a stab of guilt that the old man will fall asleep again and say no more about Sam.

 

He gets his wish when Grandfather barks, abruptly, “Build me a church!”

 

“Grandfather, you know we haven’t completed collections yet, but—“

 

“Build me a church, Dean,” Pawpa says, voice back to the begging petulance of earlier.  Dean runs a hand over his face, the difficulties of last night and sleeplessness catching up with him all at once.

 

“How?” he whispers at last, defeated by his Grandfather’s fierce gaze, fixed on something Dean isn’t privileged to see—maybe angels gathering to carry Pawpa home.  Maybe some dim and dangerous dream Dean himself doesn’t want to know.

 

“Banish the wolf and build me a church,” Grandfather answers, voice draining to shallow breaths as he closes his eyes and slips away again.

 

Shaken, unsure of what he’s meant to be doing, Dean turns to go, figuring to fix breakfast, though he doesn’t feel he could eat a thing.  There’s value in routine, though, a lesson Grandfather had driven home by strap and open hand until Dean learned it.

  
Sam never had.

 

His brother isn’t in the kitchen, though Dean had had some vague hope of seeing him.  He’s not up and about in the barn, either, and when Dean calls up into the loft, “Sam, chores!” he gets no answer.  Struck by a sudden misgiving, Dean climbs the ladder, catching himself sneaking halfway up and making a point thereafter to breathe heavily and clomp his muck boots against every rung.

 

The effort is for nothing.  The loft is empty, Lucas’ sleeping pallet and meager store of possessions undisturbed.

 

It doesn’t look like the bed’s been slept in.  For a moment, Dean indulges in relief at this revelation, afraid of what he’s thinking and unwilling to put a name to the fear.  Then fear catches him up anyway when he realizes what the empty loft means:  Sam didn’t stay at the farm last night.

 

He and Lucas are off God only knows where getting up to mischief Dean doesn’t want to speculate about. He thinks fleetingly of Miss Elizabeth’s and hopes perversely that that’s the worst his brother and the other boy manage.

 

With a heavy breath, Dean climbs back down the ladder and undertakes his brother’s morning chores.  There’s some relief in Custer’s hungry nickering—at least they couldn’t have gotten far. 

 

 _Far enough_ , Dean thinks ominously, and then shoves the treacherous thought out of his head.

 

He collects eggs only because they’ll spoil and stink up the henhouse if he doesn’t.  He has no intention of cooking them and instead leaves the untidy basket in the cold cellar, vowing to take care of it later, when he isn’t quite so preoccupied.

 

He tries praying next, even goes to his favorite spot in the yard, out under the towering oak that shades the southern side of the house from the worst of the summer’s heat.  Usually, he can find peace in the play of sunlight on the grass beneath the wide-spreading branches, but today that peace eludes him.

 

Dean tries to ask the Lord for clarity, not to save his Pawpa or bring Sam back but just to let Dean see His plan for them, what He intends with the events that have happened already—Lucas’ arrival, Sam’s recent attitude, Pawpa’s turn for the worse.

 

Dean’s lingering sense that he’s done something awful, though to his knowledge he has not.

 

He sits still as stone, awaiting some word.  Often in the past, Dean would have sworn he’d heard a voice in the prairie grass that sweeps almost up to the tree on that side, whispered secrets in a forgotten tongue that he thought he might have deciphered if only he could slip into that elusive place where God met his people on this plane, the place so many of their faithful congregation had found Sunday after Sunday but which Dean himself had never discovered.

 

Often, Dean had chastised himself for being too prideful, for feeling ashamed of the gyrations and the drooling, the way the faithful full taken by the Spirit would sometimes lose control of their bladders, or the way big, strong men, fathers and farmers, would blubber like babies and weep until snot poured from their noses and their eyes were swollen and red.

 

If it wasn’t the sin of pride that kept him from true communion with the Lord, then it had to be some other flaw of Dean’s, for surely God spoke all around them every minute, and it was only man’s weakness that kept him from hearing and understanding.

 

Unsettled and restless, Dean rises from where he’d been sitting, back propped against the oak, and rounds the front of the house, catching movement passing the porch as he nears the lane.

 

Sam and Lucas are loping back to the barn, making for the loft ladder with ground-eating strides, their feet almost silent on the hard-packed dirt.

 

He thinks about calling out to them and then decides against it, too weary to confront his brother and have yet another exchange wherein he speaks and no one really answers.  Instead, he heads to the back of the house, retrieves the egg basket from the cold cellar, and resolves to make some breakfast after all.

 

When he calls Sam to breakfast, he half expects his brother to skulk in with his head hanging, guilt dripping off of him, and that demeanor would be preferable to the posture his brother wears instead:  defiant, fairly shouting his pride in whatever it is he’s gotten away with.

 

Grandfather’s still asleep—or unconscious—but Dean regulates his voice out of habit, pitching his words low, trying to keep accusation from them.  “I did your chores for you.”

 

Sam slouches into his seat and falls to eating like he hasn’t had a steady meal in days. 

 

“Grandfather had a bad night,” Dean continues, giving his little brother a chance to confess before Dean calls him out.

 

Sam still says nothing, just drags his toast through the egg grease and takes a long slurp of coffee.

 

“I have to head into town for a spell.  Do you think you can stay close, keep an ear out for Grandfather, see about some breakfast if he wants it when he wakes?”

 

This gets a reaction out of Sam, though it’s an odd one—but then, what isn’t odd about Sam these days?  Sam pins Dean with a long, considering look, and Dean would swear his brother’s reading his mind the way he stares—not at him or through him but into him, like he’s searching out something particular.

 

At last, Sam grunts and nods.  “Yeah,” he says around a mouthful of bread.  “I can do that.”

 

“Thank you,” Dean answers, feeling ridiculous and off balance, as if it’s a favor he’s asking instead of a duty Sam should willingly undertake.

 

His brother rises abruptly, takes his dishes to the sink, snatches Lucas’ full plate from the stove top, and bangs out of the kitchen without a backward glance.

  
Dean feels like a coward for not calling Sam back, asking him where he and Lucas were all night, but a part of him is sure he shouldn’t ask after answers he’s not prepared to hear.

 

Instead, he does the dishes hurriedly, anxious to get into town and see Maisie Willard about the building fund, wondering if somehow Grandfather’s demand that Dean build him a church was the product of one of his Pawpa’s indistinct visions.

  
Telling himself he’s being foolish, Dean saddles Custer regardless and reminds himself he can speak to Doc Jennings while he’s in Sweetbranch.

  
“Sam!” he calls up to the loft, and he waits until the shuffle of feet signal his brother’s approach overhead before looking up.  “Come down now and see to your grandfather.”

 

Sam doesn’t answer Dean, though he does say something, words blurred by distance and barn board.  A lower voice answers Sam with a fluidity of sound that sets Dean’s teeth on edge.  Leading Custer out into the sunlight to fight off a sudden chill, Dean waits until he sees his brother climbing out of the loft, one hand on the ladder, one holding an empty breakfast plate.

 

“Take care of him, Sam,” Dean says.

 

Sam says nothing.

 

Dean’s almost to Sweetbranch when he’s met by three riders, Sheriff Grady on his big, rawboned dun mare and the town’s two volunteer deputies, Jeremiah Knox and Purdy Jones, mounted about as he’d expect for their station. 

 

“This is good timing,” Jones mutters, glancing at the sheriff from under the sweat-stained brim of his hat.

 

“We were riding out to see you, Dean,” Grady explains.  “There’s been an unfortunate…incident.  At the Becker place.  We figured you might have seen or heard something, you bein’ their closest neighbors ‘n all.”

 

Dean’s eyes narrow as he considers Grady’s excuse for coming to the farm.  The Beckers are a mile as the crow flies, a sight more than that by road.  It’d take better ears than Dean has to hear anything from that distance. 

 

He says as much to Grady.

  
“Well, I thought you’d say that, but it was worth the ride, anyway.”

 

“What happened, Bud?” Dean asks uneasily.

 

Knox makes a noise, something like a snort—of impatience or disbelief, Dean can’t tell—and the uneasiness turns to cold fear in his stomach.

 

“Becker’s eldest daughter, Judith, was…” 

 

By the way the man hesitates, Dean knows what he’s trying to say, and the cold climbs his throat, making it hard for him to get out the next question.

 

“Right there at the farm?”  It seems impossible. 

 

“Right there in her room,” Knox answers, moving his horse ahead until he’s crowding Custer and Dean’s boot is nearly brushing Knox’s own.

 

“Climbed in the window like a damned sneakin’ Injun and held a knife to her throat while he did it to her.”

 

Knox’s vehemence expresses itself in spittle that strikes Dean’s cheek, and he raises the hand not occupied with the reins to wipe it clear, eyes hard on Knox’s face, lips thinning to a grim line.

 

“Is she—?”

 

Grady shakes his head.  “She’s alive, but I wager right now she’s wishin’ she weren’t.”

 

“Do we know that it _wasn’t_ an Indian?” Dean asks, seeking Grady’s eyes then.

 

Knox snorts again and spits a stream of tobacco juice onto Custer’s rear hoof.

 

“Don’t know—you tell us.  ‘s that boy you got in your barn part Injun?  I hear he’s a foreigner, but with all them dark-skinned types, it’s hard to tell one from another.”

 

Dean’s too surprised to hide it, and Knox laughs, an ugly expulsion of laughter that gusts across Dean’s face in a wash of chaw and bad teeth. 

 

“Bet you thought you was so smart, keepin’ that little bastard out there.  Like no one knew it was that freak brother of yours that busted ‘im loose of the show.  Like to like, I always say, and he done prove it this time.”

 

“Enough,” Grady says, maybe seeing in Dean’s face something of his intention.

  
Dean himself hasn’t formulated it into thought, but his free hand is fisted on his thigh, his jaw clenched so tightly his teeth ache, and there’s a red veil across his vision like he’s seeing through a haze of blood.

 

“Dean, we aren’t sayin’ that Sam had anything to do with this.  We just wondered if maybe you could vouch for the whereabouts of your…guest…last night.”

 

Hiding his hesitation behind a deep breath, Dean makes a show of relaxing in the saddle before turning bland eyes on the sheriff and lying through his teeth.

  
“Sam was inside with me.  Grandfather took a turn—I’m heading to see Doc Jennings now—and we were up on and off through the night.  I can’t tell you where Lucas was, but Sam saw him at supper time—took him out a plate and brought it back in after the boy finished.  Must’ve been seven o’clock or so when Sam came inside for good.”

 

“I am sorry to hear about the Reverend, Dean.  I won’t keep you any longer, but I might need to ride out and speak to this Lucas boy.  I’d be happy to wait until you’ll be there, too, seeing as how your Grandfather’s ailing.  Say round about two?”

 

Dean nods, works up a smile that leaves the corners of his lips feeling stretched and unnatural, and says, “That’ll be fine, Sheriff.”

 

Tipping his hat, he cants his head toward Purdy in farewell before giving Custer a little heel and urging him back on their way.  Knox has to shift his horse out of the way, and Dean stares at him hard, eyes promising all kinds of things it’s never been in his heart to deliver before now.

 

Giddy with his sins, with the sudden expansion of his world to include bearing false witness, never mind the wrath he can still feel heating his veins, Dean begins to hum, stopping short two verses in when he realizes it’s “Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree,” a sorrowful song that warns every listener of the Lord’s fury in the earth’s final days.

 

After that, he rides with only the steady rhythm of Custer’s hooves on the hard ground and the counterpoint of his heart beating like heels against a hardwood floor in his chest.

 

*****

 

Doc Jennings agrees to stop out to the farm that evening for supper, disguising the real intention of his visit with sharing a meal with an old friend.  Dean hopes Grandfather will be up to the company and won’t kick against the doctor’s examination.

 

Real errand accomplished, Dean turns Custer’s head toward the north end of town.  The Willards live a half-mile out of town on a sprawling farm patched together of odd lots and easements from other places.  Jed and Maisie Willard had come to Sweetbranch ten years ago with two little girls and all of their earthly possessions piled precariously into the back of a narrow, bent-axled buckboard.

 

Willard had done alright for himself, Dean reflects, turning into the long drive that leads to the Willard farmhouse.  The narrow clapboard house gleams under a fresh coat of whitewash.  Bright dresses flap like banners in the omnipresent prairie wind, their colors and shapes making the motherless Dean vaguely anxious.

 

Delilah Willard is peeling potatoes on the side porch, her bare feet coated in a light patina of dust, wet hair unbound, trailing damp lines down the thin cotton back of her dress.

 

“Your mother around?” Dean asks.

 

Delilah pulls a face and puts on a pout.  “Why, I’m fine, Mr. Winchester.  Thank you for asking.  Lovely day, isn’t it?”

 

Dean hopes she attributes the sudden heat in his cheeks to the bright sun.  “I apologize, Miss Delilah.  I forgot my manners.  I’m glad to hear you’re well.  Is your mother at home?”

 

Delilah giggles and leaps to her feet, dropping a half-peeled potato into a bowl of naked white ones.  “She’s around back working on the tiller with Pa,” Delilah explains, moving off the porch in the direction of the big barn that sits in the northeast corner of the lot.

 

Dean dismounts and leads Custer after her, trying to ignore the way her coy glances and corner-of-the-eye smiles make him uncomfortable.

 

He’s relieved to see Maisie Willard elbow-deep in axle grease, Jed holding the tiller steady as she applies it.

 

“Thank you, Miss Delilah,” Dean says, tipping his hat to the girl.  She giggles, bats her eyes at him vigorously, and sashays away, hair unfurling like a brilliant flag behind her.

 

“That girl,” Jed grumbles, slotting a chagrined smile at Dean.

 

“She’s sixteen, Jed,” Maisie says, in a tone that suggests this is an old, old song between them.

 

“Going on twenty-six,” Jed answers, clearly the expected refrain.

 

“You’ll pardon me for not shaking your hand,” Jed observes, nodding at the state of his hands, greasy like Maisie’s.

 

“Can I help?” Dean asks, making to shrug out of his jacket and roll up his sleeves.

  
“No sir,” Jed answers. “We’ve about got it.  And you’d ruin your shirt.”

 

“You come about the building fund, I expect,” Maisie says without looking up from her work.

 

“I have,” Dean answers, embarrassment evident in his tone.  He doesn’t want to put Maisie on the spot, but he has to ask, if only to report to his grandfather that he had. 

 

Lying to the sheriff to protect his brother was one thing.  Lying to his grandfather is quite another.

 

“Grandfather’s taken a turn, and he’s gotten it into his head that there’s going to be a church.”  Dean trails off, uncertain how much more to say.  The Willards are among the most faithful of their congregation, but Dean isn’t sure how they’ll take the impending loss of their pastor.

 

Or if they’ll accept Dean as his grandfather’s replacement.

 

“I’m sorry to hear it, Dean,” Jed says at once, dropping easily into the less formal address Dean has been used to hearing since he was a little boy.  “Your grandfather’s a good man, and his afflictions and trials have been sore and many.”  
  
This is as close as any will come to the platitudes most people feel comfortable only voicing at the graveside.

 

_He’s in a better place._

_At least he’s not suffering._

_He’s with the Lord, whom he loved above all things._

 

“That they have,” Maisie chimes in.  “But he’s borne them all like Job himself.  He’s blessed of the Lord, for sure.”

 

Dean makes an affirmative sound and ducks his head as if saying a momentary prayer.  Then he clears his throat and says, “So…”

 

“Oh, Dean,” Maisie says, stilling her busy hands at the grease bucket.  She looks up at him, pity in her eyes.  “There’s just not enough.”

 

“How much is there, altogether?” he asks.

 

Maisie’s eyes track sideways toward her husband and just as quick dart back to Dean.  Had he not had a good deal of recent practice at watching his brother lie to him, Dean may not have noticed the look at all, much less taken its proper meaning.

 

As things are, though, he knows what he’s about to hear is a falsehood, bold as brass.

 

“Round about a hundred dollars,” she says, looking not at him but over his left shoulder.  “Give or take a nickel or two.”

 

“Times have been hard, Dean,” Jed chimes in.  “And the Lord did caution us to take care of our own first before giving to the poor.”

 

It takes all of Dean’s waning strength not to speak out against such audacity.  That the man should justify his own sins by throwing the bible at Dean!

 

Dean laughs, a hollow, strange sound, and clears his throat, at last squinting off into the distance like he’s seen something funny there.

 

“Well, then, I guess I’ll just collect what money we do have and see if I can’t use it in some other way to ease my grandfather’s mind on his deathbed.”

 

He thinks he’s smiling, though it feels like he might be baring his teeth instead, but it must work, because Jed straightens from his work and says, “Of course, the money belongs to the congregation and not your grandfather, but we’ll be happy to give it to you just as soon as we can get it from the bank.”

 

“I could ride over there right now,” Dean observes mildly, eyeing the sun’s progress through the sky.  “It’s not yet eleven o’clock.”

 

Jed shakes his head.  “Well, see, I’d like for you to do that, Dean, but I’m afraid you need my signature.  They aren’t going to give you that kind of cash on your word, no matter how righteous a man you are.  And I can’t leave the farm today—I have a passel of work to finish before dark.  But I promise you, first thing Monday morning, I’ll go to the bank and withdraw the money and bring it out to your grandfather myself.  Will that suit?”

 

“Do I have a choice?” Dean asks, still with the deceptive calm that presages disaster, the frayed edges of his temper about to snap and loose him out into a dark, dark void.  He wants to bring harm to any who have ever hurt him.

 

“I hardly think there’s call for you to take that tone with us,” Maisie says, straightening from the grease bucket and waving a filthy hand at him.  “We aren’t trying to keep the money from your grandfather.  If it’ll give him ease, we can loan it out.”  She speaks as if to a child who has forgotten his manners, and Dean draws himself up in answer, squaring his shoulders and tightening his jaw.

 

“I intend to build a church with that money, Mrs. Willard,” Dean says at last, after his staunch silence has made the couple awkward, shifting nervously in place beside the arthritic tiller.  “It’s my grandfather’s final wish, and I mean to fulfill it.  That money was given in good will to the church and for the church.  And I shall build that church in the high places, and the holy and righteous shall be its body, and Christ shall be its head.”

 

The Willards stare at him as though they’ve never seen him before, and Dean feels a stab of power and pride in their reaction, gratified that he has struck them with the fear of the Lord.  He turns away from them then, as if they’re of no consequence to him, buzzing with the heady feel of having control of the situation. 

 

Whatever else happens, he knows Jed Willard will be at his door come Monday with a hundred dollars in his penitent hand.  Praise the Lord.

 

His elation is short-lived when Dean realizes what he has to face at the farm, knowing that his newfound power to sway people with his preaching will have no effect at all on Sam. 

 

Of course, Sam had nothing to do with the attack on Judith Becker.  He might be willful, defiant, and taken by fits of strangeness now and again, but Sam hasn’t got it in him to treat another human being with such brutality.

 

Lucas, on the other hand… Well, Dean just doesn’t know.  If Sam was with Lucas, then Lucas can’t have been the attacker.  But if Sam follows Dean’s lie about his whereabouts last night, he’ll be leaving Lucas without a witness to his own.  It puts the boy in jeopardy.

 

Dean wants to believe that Sam’s loyalty still lies with the family, but he doesn’t know what Sam and Lucas actually spent the night doing, and he can’t help but wonder about how they spend most of their time together.  Swallowing a flare of feeling—indecipherable but breathtaking—Dean tightens his hand on the reins and turns into the lane.

  
Sam is waiting in the yard before the barn, looking for all the world like he’s been there since Dean had left.  He takes Custer’s reins and asks, “Did you see Doc Jennings?”

 

Dean nods.  “He’ll be out for supper and to see to Grandfather.”

 

“Any other word from town?”

 

He spears Sam with a sharp look, voice going hard.  “Why, Sam?  You got something you need to tell me?” 

  
 _Last chance, little brother_ , he thinks.

 

“No,” Sam all but shouts, arms flinging wide in his typical defensive posture, Custer’s head jerking up at sudden pressure on his bit.

 

Dean relieves Sam of the reins and soothes Custer with a hand to his neck, a motion that Sam’s eyes track.

 

Again, Dean feels something sucking the air from his lungs.  “What do you want, Sam?” 

 

He’s not sure what he means by the question, so he expects Sam to respond with confusion. 

 

Instead, his brother steps towards him, dropping his hands to his brother’s shoulders and staring steadily into his eyes from half an arm’s length away.

 

“You know, Dean,” Sam whispers.  “You already know.”

 

Dean shakes himself from under his brother’s hands, brushes by him, leading Custer. 

 

“Freedom, I suppose, to come and go as you please, never mind the consequences of what you’re up to when you’re away from the farm.”

 

That’s not at all the answer Dean saw in his brother’s eyes, but he’d prefer just about anything to putting a name to Sam’s expression.

 

Sam’s laugh says Dean’s a coward, and Dean finds his hands shaking as he tries to uncinch Custer’s girth. 

 

“Need help with that?” Sam says from too close.  Dean can feel his brother’s breath on the back of his neck, the heat of Sam’s body making him too warm all along his back. 

 

“What are you doing, Sam?” Dean asks, ashamed to hear his voice shaking like his hands.

 

“You already know that, too, Dean.”

 

“Sam, we can’t.”

 

That should be cause enough for God’s wrathful fire.  Lightning should shatter the blue sky and burn Dean down.  In his denial, he’s admitted something aloud to Sam that Dean’s never acknowledged or named, something that’s clung to him out of the dark of shameful dreams.

 

He holds his breath and closes his eyes, not praying that God will be merciful and spare him but only that God will be quick about his destruction.

  
“Why not, Dean?”  And Sam’s voice is strangely gentle, like a caress on the bare skin at the nape of Dean’s neck, where he can still feel his brother’s breath.

 

“Sam,” Dean chokes, pushing Custer hard to move the horse away, saddle sliding off the far side to land with a thump, Custer skittering, tossing his head against the tie-downs, Dean brushing the horse’s flank in his haste to escape.

  
Custer crow-kicks, catching Dean on the thigh, and he grunts and staggers but keeps his feet, getting clear at last of the horse’s reach and rubbing the sore spot.  It’s not broken, or it wouldn’t bear his weight, but it hurts like hell.

 

Lowering himself onto a bale of hay in the barn aisle, Dean starts to laugh, caught up all at once by the notion that this is God’s answer to Dean’s near-surrender to temptation.

 

God has given him a sign that Dean’s flirting with perdition, and he’s grateful for the spreading ache in his leg for the clarity it brings.

 

This is insanity.

 

“Dean—“ Sam says, approaching. 

 

Dean flings up a hand like an Old Testament prophet. 

 

“Don’t, Sam.  I’m alright.  I’m fine,” still laughing.  “Better than, in fact,” he continues, imagining this is how David must have felt when he’d slain Goliath:  Invincible and unstoppable and lucky—so damned lucky.

 

“We haven’t finished,” Sam says uncertainly, eyes at last betraying the confusion Dean had hoped for all along.

  
“Yes, we have,” Dean answers confidently, standing from the hay and brushing the seat of his pants. “I won’t hear another word of this from you, Sam, and that’s final.  There’s a posse coming in an hour to talk to your friend Lucas about an attack at the Becker farm last night.  I don’t suppose you know anything about that?”

 

Still bewildered from Dean’s change of mood, Sam can’t hide his honest reaction—fear.

 

Struck breathless once again—this time by a chilling horror—Dean feels his elation ripped away by a whirlwind of doubt.

 

“What did you do, Sam?” he asks, not accusatory, just sorrowful, as though he already knows the answer.

 

But Sam is shaking his head, his chin trembling, eyes filling up with tears, and he says, “Dean,” like he’s been mortally wounded or like he’s lost in the dark of a terrible storm.

 

Dean can withstand the temptation of his brother’s skin heat, but he cannot resist him in pain or in need.  He takes a hesitant step toward his little brother, his head battling with his heart.

 

“We didn’t—“ Sam whispers, loosing a single tear that tracks its way down his cheek.

 

“I believe you, Sam,” Dean says, though he’s not sure if he does.  Maybe Sam didn’t mean to be involved in the attack.  Maybe he wasn’t even with Lucas when it happened.  “But Sheriff Grady and his men will be here in an hour, and it’s them you have to convince.”

 

“What do I tell them?”  Sam closes the space between them and pauses just out of arm’s reach.  “What do I say?”

 

He sounds so much like the little boy Dean raised, who’d reach for Dean in the middle of a nightmare and sob desperate questions into his chest.

 

“You tell them exactly what I did, Sam, which is—“  
  


Like a light’s suddenly flared, Dean remembers where they are and shoots a glare at the loft.

 

“He’s not there,” Sam says quietly.  “He went out somewhere.”

 

Still, the barn doesn’t seem to belong strictly to them anymore, so Dean turns and gestures for Sam to follow him out to the praying tree.  There, squatting on the grass, shoulder to shoulder and sharing the sun-warmed trunk against their backs, Dean says, “I told Bud Grady that you were inside helping me with Grandfather all night, and that’s just what you’ll say when he asks.”

 

“But Lucas—“

 

“Isn’t your problem, Sam.  If he didn’t do anything wrong, he’ll come out of this thing just fine.  And if he did—“

 

“He didn’t!”  In Sam’s tone are echoes of his earlier insolence.

 

“Then everything will work out fine, Sam.  Have faith,” Dean starts before remembering that Sam possesses precious little of that.  “In me,” he adds belatedly, risking a side glance at his brother.

 

Sam’s face is a highwayman’s mask, and Dean can’t see his eyes from this angle.

 

“Trust me, Sam.  This is the best way.”

 

Sam shrugs, and Dean feels it against his own shoulder.  “Fine,” he says at last, but it doesn’t feel like surrender.

 

“Sam,” Dean warns, putting a hand to his brother’s forearm, feeling the strength in him and all at once a sense of wonderment that this young man is his to shape and mold and make new with the zeal of the house of the Lord.

 

“I’ll do it,” Sam says, rising up suddenly like struck oil, casting a shadow over Dean’s face in the instant before he turns and bolts for the barn.

 

It’s Dean’s turn for bewilderment as he tries to figure out just where things have gone so wrong, how they’ve come to this place between breaking and being.

 

Then, he remembers Grandfather, alone in the house all this time, and he stands and brushes himself off and treads with heavy steps back into the house.

 

*****

 

Dust comes before them like a warning cloud, and Dean’s waiting on the porch to see four horsemen coming up the lane.

 

Sheriff Grady has brought Noah Becker, Judith’s brother, with him, in addition to Knox and Jones.  Bud apologizes with a look when Noah leaps from his horse, dropping the reins, and storms up to Dean, clench-fisted, shouting, “Where’s the bastard that raped my sister?”

 

“Now, Noah,” Dean begins.  “I know you’re suffering and that things are hard right now, but there’s no need for shouting or for rash accusations.  We have nothing to hide here.”

 

“Where is he?” Noah repeats, biting out each word.

 

From the advantage of the porch, Dean looks down at the livid young man and considers what to say next.  He takes a deep breath and lets his eyes close, casts his thoughts to heaven, seeking the words.

 

“He didn’t do it,” he hears, and he opens his eyes with a sigh.  He doesn’t have to turn around to know that Sam is standing in the screen door behind him, looking over his shoulder at the stricken young Becker brother.

 

“How do you know?” Becker snarls, advancing on the porch.  Dean holds his ground, hands open at his sides, palms out, in a gesture meant to suggest that there’s no threat here.

 

“I—“

 

“Sam,” Dean says, very softly, trying to convey with his words the delicate balancing act he’s attempting, like trying to keep a feather aloft with nothing but breath and a prayer.  “Please.”

 

“Noah,” Bud Grady says, chiming in at last.  “Let me do the askin’, if you don’t mind.” 

 

The young man, fairly vibrating with anger, doesn’t budge an inch, just stands there, every muscle rigid, staring through Dean to his brother dim through the screen behind him.

 

“Where were you last night, Sam?”

 

“Here,” Sam answers, voice only a half-step above sullen.

 

“In the house?”

 

Sam hesitates, and Dean doesn’t dare breathe with waiting.  At last, he says, “Yeah.  Grandfather was sick, so I was inside helping Dean take care of him.”

 

“Did you leave the house any time during the night?”

 

“Just for the privy,” he answers.

 

“That’s all?”  The sheriff’s voice is firm, but Dean thinks he hears doubt in the question.  He figures it’s time to interrupt.

  
“He said he was in the house, Bud.  What more do you want him to say?”

 

“Well, for starters, he can tell us where that freak in the barn was last night,” Noah growls, murder in his eyes.  “For that matter, why don’t we just go out there and get him ourselves, Sheriff?  I don’t understand why we’re standin’ here jawin’ when we could be talkin’ to the one that done it.”

 

“Noah, I let you come along because your father asked me, but if you keep carryin’ on, I’m goin’ to have Purdy here escort you back to the road to wait.  Is that clear?”

 

For a span of some seconds, it seems a near thing, but at last, Noah seems to deflate, all the starch going out of his shoulders, all the energy from his eyes.  He retreats back to where the others are still mounted and picks up his horse’s reins.

 

“Now, Sam, we aren’t askin’ this to accuse you or Lucas of anything but just to sort of take you out of the picture, if you see what I’m gettin’ at.  You know anything at all about where that boy was last night ‘round about three in the morning?”

 

Dean hears nothing, but Sam must shake his head, for Grady gives a jerk of his chin and says, “Alright, then.  I believe you.  Now, we’d like to speak to Lucas, if you’d be good enough to fetch him out of the barn, Dean.”

 

“I’d like to do that for you, Bud, surely I would, but the fact is, the boy up and left sometime before I got back from town.  Sam says he went off cross fields.”  Dean indicates the west with his thumb.  “’bout eleven o’clock or so, near as Sam can tell.”

 

“That’s mighty convenient,” Knox sneers from where he’s lounged over the saddle horn, taking in the show.  “Seems like somebody musta warned him we were comin’.”

 

Dean gives Knox a cool look.  “Well, I don’t know who that might have been, given that I was at the Willards’ around that time.  I’m sure you can ask them yourself.  Or ask Bradley.  I stopped on my way back from their place to let him know I might not be in to work on Monday on account of Grandfather’s condition.  That must’ve been around eleven thirty.”

 

Grady nods as if satisfied and asks, “Can I take a look in the barn all the same, Dean?”

 

“Sure, Sheriff.  We want to do everything we can to help you catch the devil who did this to poor Judith.”  He adds in a different tone, quieter, “We’re all praying for her, Noah, her and all of you.  Anything we can do, you just let us know.”

 

“You’ve done enough,” he answers calmly, his demeanor all the more ominous for his blowing earlier.

Grady dismounts and strides toward the barn, calling to them from the aisle, “Up there?”

 

“Yes, sir,” Dean answers promptly, sure that Grady will find nothing of use because Dean himself had already been up in the loft poking through the boy’s things and had found nothing at all to implicate him in last night’s terrible crime.

 

Of course, he might have taken the evidence with him when he left that morning.

 

“Looks like he plans on comin’ back,” Grady observes when he’s remounted.  “Did you notice if he took anything with him when he went, Sam?”

 

“No,” Sam answers brusquely, not elaborating.

 

“Sam,” Dean warns, and his brother sighs hard enough that Dean can hear it from six feet away.

 

“He didn’t have anything with him that I could see.  He didn’t say anything, either, just took off.  I figured he was going out exploring.  He likes his freedom.”

 

“I’ll just bet he does,” Knox mutters, implying something ugly with his tone.

  
“If that’s all, Sheriff?”  Dean intones it like a question, but his meaning is clear.  They’re about to outstay their welcome.

 

“That’ll do,” Grady answers, tipping his hat.  “Thank you for your help, Dean.  Tell your Grandfather that me and the missus are prayin’ for him.”

 

“Thank you, Sheriff.  Hope to see you Sunday.”

 

Grady gives him a speculative look.  “You preachin’, Dean?”

 

“I’m hoping Grandfather will be well enough, but if he’s too ill, I’ll take his place at the pulpit.”

 

“I guess we’ll see you either way,” Grady answers noncommittally.

 

“Yessir.”

 

Dean doesn’t leave his place on the porch until all four riders turn out of their lane and into the road, heading back toward town.

 

“Noah Becker did it,” Sam says without preamble or explanation.

 

Dean turns, trying to make out Sam’s expression through the rusted mesh of the wire screen.

 

“What are you talking about, Sam?”

 

“I saw it in his heart, Dean.  He did it to his sister.  He did it himself.  That’s why he’s so angry.  He doesn’t want anyone to know.”

 

The creeping cold of horror in Dean’s belly is replaced all at once by a flash of fury.  “You can’t save your friend by slandering a neighbor’s good name like that, Sam.  Bearing false witness is a terrible sin.”

 

Sam’s expression is inscrutable, but his snort is clear enough.  “Figures you’d take their side.  I’m telling you I _Saw_ it, Dean.”

 

Dean can’t miss what Sam means by the emphasis, but he still can’t believe…

 

“Why would she lie, then, Judith?  Why wouldn’t she just tell her family what happened?”

 

“Put yourself in her place, Dean.  She has to live with Noah under the same roof.  If she tells her family what he did and they don’t believe her, what’s to stop him from hurting her again?  Or even killing her?”

 

Dean can’t fault his brother’s logic, but it makes him suspicious that Sam has such a fine grasp of the specifics.

 

“Did you and Lucas work this out together, or did he feed you these lies to tell, Samuel?”  He uses his brother’s full name for effect, but it has an unexpected result.

 

Sam’s answering sneer is evident in every word.  “I’m not the one lying, Dean.  If anyone’s been lying, it’s you.”  As he speaks, he opens the screen door and advances on Dean until they’re separated by only a couple of feet of warped porch boards.

 

“What are you talking about?”  Dean hates the roughness in his voice, the way it makes him sound guilty…or aroused.

 

“This,” Sam answers, waving a pointed finger between the two of them.  “You and me.  What’s happening with us.”

 

“There’s nothing…happening,” Dean asserts, stumbling over the last word.  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

 

“That’s bull, and you know it.”  Sam takes a step closer, close enough that they’re almost touching where Dean’s chest rises and falls, faster and faster as his heartbeat thunders in his ears.

 

“Sam,” Dean manages, the word fractured with his breath.  “Don’t.”

 

“Why not, Dean?  You know what this is.  You know what we’re meant to be.  Imagine what I could give you, what I could _show_ you of the sin in men’s hearts.  You could bring so many to salvation with just a word or two aimed at their secret guilt.  You could have a church…”

 

Sam’s voice is soft, persuasive, his eyes shining with a vision Dean can’t bring himself to share.  What Sam’s describing—the power to bring men to Christ, to preach to their hearts and leave them weeping in shame and repentance…  Dean’s always wanted that.  Always.  But he can’t.  What Sam’s suggesting…

 

How can he save other men if Dean loses his own soul? 

 

Dean’s a coward for the relief that surges through him when Grandfather’s bellow from inside the house interrupts them.  He steps back from his brother abruptly, edges around him to the door, escaping with an explosion of breath to the kitchen, which seems like a foreign place to him now that he’s seeing it through the eyes of Sam’s suggestion.

 

He has to gather himself before going to Grandfather, knowing that the minister’s Sight might well discern Dean’s guilt—guilt in thought only, it’s true, but a sin nevertheless—and condemn Dean and Sam both.

 

Dean couldn’t stand to lose Grandfather’s respect so close to the old man’s obviously imminent demise.

 

When he’s caught his breath, Dean moves down the hall toward Grandfather’s back bedroom, but he’s not even to the doorway when the old man begins speaking.

  
In a clear, sonorous voice, as though he’s at the pulpit on a sunny Sunday morning and preaching to a packed tent, Grandfather says, “The devil comes in many forms, and it is only they who are aware of the Christ Jesus in their lives who can see the devil’s face and banish him.  Do you take Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?  Do you accept the gift he offers you?  Do you drive out the devil from your life, the devil of greed, the devil of gluttony, the devil of lust and evil desires?  Or will you wallow in the devil’s temporary offerings and suffer eternally in the fires of hell?”

 

Dean pauses in the door, staring at his Grandfather, whose blind eyes are rolling in his skull.  Spittle catches at the edge of his mouth, as if he’s foaming with madness, and his head shakes convulsively where he tries to lift it from the sweat-stained pillow.

 

“You’re going to burn, Dean,” Grandfather says then, stilling suddenly and rising up enough to level his sightless eyes on Dean, whose breath is caught in his throat, heart pounding in sudden fear.  “You’re going to burn if you let that brother of yours lead you to the devil.”

 

The last is said in a markedly different voice as the old man’s head collapses against the pillow and he rattles out a long breath.  His eyes close wearily and he seems to sink into the mattress.

  
Dean’s sure his Pawpa is dead when he finally approaches the bed, but the old man opens his eyes again, chest rising and falling with rapid, shallow breaths.  He raises a hand weakly, barely clearing the quilt, and Dean takes his Pawpa’s hand.

 

“It’s hard to resist some temptations, son.  I know this.  I’ve lived with sin so black that my very breath was stained with it.  But you can’t let Sam have what he most desires, Dean.  You can’t give in to his enticements.  He loves you.  And that love will damn you forever.”

 

Dean drops to his knees beside his grandfather’s bed, clutching the old man’s cold, cold hands in his.

 

“I know,” he answers in a confessional whisper.  “But Pawpa, it’s Sam.”

 

That’s all he needs to say to the man who raised him from a child.  Dean’s been helpless against Sam’s needs since the squalling, still-damp infant was thrust by the midwife into his shaking arms where he stood outside Mama’s closed bedroom door.  The screaming had stopped, and Dean was relieved, for he’d never heard a sound so terrible before, not even when the wind kicked up a twister and tore across the plains with furious intent.

 

But the strange-smelling baby who kicked and cried was no comfort to Dean, who wanted his mother more than anything else, and who didn’t know what he was supposed to do with the red-faced creature shrieking in his arms.

 

Still, Pa had taught Dean to be pretty self-sufficient for a four-year-old, so he’d taken the baby into the parlor, set it down on the settee, and then climbed up himself with some effort and laid the baby on his lap.

 

And there he’d stayed while the midwife murmured with Pa in the hall outside of the back bedroom, which had been Mama and Pa’s room then, and while the menfolk, Pawpa among them, had waited on the porch, scuffing their bootheels and smoking.

 

By the time Pa had finally come into the parlor, Dean’s legs had fallen asleep along with the baby on them, and he hadn’t dared to shift his weight for fear of the crying starting up again.

 

“Hey, Dean,” Pa had said softly, resting his big, warm hand on Dean’s head.  If the hand had shaken a little, Dean tried not to notice.

 

“Is Mama alright?” Dean had asked, and Pa’s hand had tightened on Dean’s skull.

 

“She’s with our Lord and the angels now, Dean,” Pa had explained, removing his hand to kneel in front of Dean.  Still he hadn’t looked at or touched the sleeping baby, and Dean wanted to squirm out from under his burden and be taken into his Pa’s arms.

 

Instead, he had sat, frozen by confusion and by the strange glimmer of tears in his father’s eyes.

 

“I have to go away, too, Dean.  And I might not be back for awhile.  So you have to take care of…of your brother.  Do you understand?  You have to help your grandfather around the place and take care of your little brother.”

 

Dean had nodded, feeling the tears starting in his own eyes.  He had bitten his lower lip to keep it from trembling and said, “When are you coming back?”

 

Pa had shaken his head and given a strange sort of smile.  “I have hunting to do, Dean, and I’m not sure where my quarry’s gone.  But I’ll be home just as soon as I can, you can be sure.  You don’t have to worry, Dean.  I’ll be home.”

 

But Pa hadn’t come home, not ever again.

 

Days had passed and then a week went by with no word from Dean’s father.  Grandfather, who was then a strong man, broad-shouldered and powerful, had hired a girl to come help with the baby, who Grandfather had said was named Samuel.

 

“Samuel was God’s first prophet of the people, Dean,” Pawpa had explained the morning they buried Mama, even though Pa wasn’t yet home.  “God spoke to him, and Samuel promised to always carry the word to God’s chosen.  I think it’s a good name for a Winchester, don’t you?”

 

“Yessir,” Dean had answered, though he felt a little strange.  He wanted to be a preacher himself, just like his Pawpa, and he didn’t know if both he and his brother could do the same job. 

 

Dean hadn’t had a chance to ask, though, for just then a horse had been heard galloping up the lane, and Grandfather had gone out on the porch to see who it was that had come.

 

He’d come back into the room with a look on his face so frightening that Dean’s oatmeal had gone shifty in his belly, and he was afraid that he might vomit it all up right there at the table.

 

“I have to leave, Dean,” Grandfather had said.  “But I’ll be back in a day or two.  Mrs. Evans will be over to look after you and Samuel.  I’ll see your mother laid to rest and then be off.”

 

He’d wanted to ask, but he knew better, for hadn’t Pa and Grandfather both beaten into Dean that children were to be seen and not heard, that he shouldn’t speak until spoken to? 

 

They’d put his mama in the ground on a day so bright that it hurt his eyes, even with squinting.  The ground was hard and dry, and every spade-full that fell onto her coffin sounded like whispering voices just out of his sight.  Dean hadn’t liked it, and to this day, when he hears children whispering, it reminds him of his mother’s coffin going under the earth.

 

Pa had never returned.  Grandfather had come back six days later, sunburned and blinded, lips cracked, face peeling.  The horse that had carried him had gotten as far as the yard and then folded up and groaned and died.

 

Grandfather had slumped from the saddle like a sack of dropped potatoes, and little Dean had stood there, stricken dumb by the sight, voiceless until Mrs. Evans had come from the kitchen and said, “Lord have mercy!” and started hollering, “Jethro!  You—Jethro!” to call Mr. Evans in from the back of beyond.

 

To this day, Dean doesn’t know exactly what became of his Pa, only that he’d died somehow, though Grandfather had done everything he could to prevent it.

 

Grandfather’s hands shift beneath Dean’s enough to recall him to the here and now, and his eyes drift up to his Pawpa’s face.

 

The man’s complexion is yellowed like old newspaper and the bones of his skull seem stretched somehow, so that the skin no longer fits right.  His mouth is always open now, his tongue gone pale and livid, like a bloated maggot.  He reeks of the sour-sweet smell of decay, and Dean has to suppress a shiver.

  
It’s like kneeling at the edge of an open grave.

 

“He’s not your brother, Dean, but it’s still a terrible sin, more terrible than you can imagine.  No man could ever be washed clean of it, you understand me.  No man.  Not even you, the righteous man.”

 

Dean’s eyes widen and he shifts on the hard wood floor, suddenly aware of his prayerful position and ashamed of it.  Like a hypocrite pretending to prayer.

 

“I’m not righteous, Grandfather,” Dean whispers, barely audible over his Grandfather’s labored breathing.  “I’m a sinner, through and through.  I deserve perdition.”

 

Pawpa’s hands shift restlessly beneath Dean’s and he lets go and sits back on his heels.  Unerringly, Grandfather reaches out a trembling hand to touch Dean on the forehead in a gesture half benefaction, half warding.

 

If he didn’t know better, Dean would suspect his Grandfather of papacy. He’d swear he can feel a cold cross burning on the flesh of his forehead when Pawpa’s hand drops away.

“Pawpa?” Dean whispers, not understanding.

 

“Samuel was—“

 

It’s only the creak of a floorboard that warns Dean of what his Grandfather must have already known—there’s someone standing in the doorway behind him.

 

Dean turns his head to see Sam standing there.

  
“Doc Jennings is here,” Sam says, face carefully blank.  “I’ll take his horse and send him in.”

 

“Thank you, Sam,” Dean answers, rising awkwardly against the stiffness in his knees.  How long had he been like that?

 

When he turns to Grandfather to tell him that his old friend is there to visit, he sees that the old man has fallen asleep or unconscious.  His eyelids flutter against a narrow gap of jaundiced pupil where his eyes haven’t quite closed.

 

Turning away, Dean rubs a hand over his forehead, trying to wipe away the feeling of cold that seems to pierce through to his brain, making his temples hurt and his jaw ache with clenching against the intrusive feeling.

 

Despite the persistent ache and a sense of a shadow over him, as if light is shifting away from him as he moves, Dean manages a tired smile for Doctor Eustace Jennings, who has been friends with Grandfather since before their earliest days in Sweetbranch.

 

Dean can remember tummy aches alleviated by Doc’s personal remedy, which came in a dark brown bottle and smelled like peppermint and something else, something sharp that tingled his tongue.  Doc’s kind blue eyes would smile into Dean’s, his wide, warm hand making gentle circles on his belly, and he’d rumble, “You’ll be just fine,” and Dean would believe him.

 

Those hands are still big and capable, though sprinkled with liver spots and a little shaky.  Doc greets Dean in the kitchen with a solemn smile and a handshake.

 

“He didn’t have the strength to get up today,” Dean explains after the preliminary niceties are done.

 

Doc nods, one hand tight on his black leather bag’s cracked handles. 

 

“I’ll take a look.  But, Dean, you know—“

 

Doc lets his voice trail off, and it’s Dean’s turn to nod.  He does know, and there’s no use making Doc say it.

 

“Thanks, Doc,” Dean says.  “I hope pork chops are to your liking?”

 

“Always,” Doc answers, already moving toward the back bedroom.  “Lots of gravy,” he adds, as if Dean needed to be told.  He’s lost count of the number of meals they’ve shared with the doctor.

 

Dean gets the skillet out and calls out the door, “Sam, I could use your help.”

 

From the speed with which Sam appears at the screen door, he must’ve been close, maybe sitting around the back side of the porch.

 

“Could you get me a half dozen porkchops and two eggs from the cellar?”

 

Without a word, Sam turns away from the door and heads for the back of the house.

 

Dean busies himself with the meal and with trying to predict the diagnosis by the tone of the deep rumblings coming from the back room.  Doc seems to be doing most of the talking, the much quieter intervals obviously his Grandfather’s weak responses.

 

Supper’s almost fixed—cold greens, pork chops with gravy, bread that Dean had picked up in town earlier that day—when Doc returns to the kitchen.

 

Sam has set the table for three, and Doc takes his usual place, back to the door, facing his patient’s room.  Sam sits sink-side, Dean with his back to the hall.  It’s his grandfather’s usual seat, and it feels strange to Dean to be looking out through the screen door to the drive.  Usually, he sits in the next seat, but for tonight, he can’t bring himself to face Sam.

 

Sure that the heat in his face is obvious to everyone there, hoping that the Doc doesn’t ask him if he’s feeling feverish, Dean tucks into his meal with feigned relish, not tasting a mouthful much less enjoying it.

 

The Doc eats with his usual quiet economy, Sam with a typical speed.  He asks to be excused and nods toward the stove without looking once at the Doc.  Dean gives him tacit permission to fix a plate for Lucas.  It’s not as if the Doc doesn’t know by now that they’ve got the boy living in their barn.

 

When Sam has banged out of the kitchen without a word to either of them, Doc clears his throat, takes a draught of cold water, and then pushes his plate away.

 

There’s a long moment of tense quiet before Doc says, with no preamble, “He hasn’t got very long, Dean.  His heart’s giving out.  I’d say he’s got a few days, maybe a week, longest.”

 

Dean nods, and despite that he knew what he was likely to hear, he has to swallow around a sudden lump in his throat.

 

“You need any help taking care of things, Dean?”

 

Dean shakes his head, gives an uncertain, “No,” and then repeats it more firmly a moment later.

 

“No, I think we’ll be alright.  I’m working on getting the church built, and I was planning to plow the back sixty in the next week or so.  I was hoping for a little rain to loosen the soil, but I can’t wait much longer.  I have to get the seed in.”

 

“Your brother going to help with that?”

 

Dean can’t help the smile that he can feel twisting up one corner of his mouth.  It’s no use predicting what Sam will do, but he can’t say that to Doc. 

 

Apparently, he doesn’t have to.  Doc swears, low and long, and then says, “Excuse my cussing, Dean, but that brother of yours has always been a mess of trouble.  I guess I’d hoped he’d straighten out by now, maybe find a little of that God you and your granddaddy go on about.  Seems like he just gets stranger by the day, though.  And that boy in the barn doesn’t help, I reckon.”

 

Dean brings a sharp gaze up to the doctor’s face.  “What do you know about Lucas?”

 

“I know what’s likely been done to him, if that’s what you mean.  Got a pretty good look at him the first night of the medicine show.  And I can tell you from experience that young ones that go through something awful like that, they’re… Well, they get a little touched.  They just aren’t right anymore.  I’ve seen it once or twice before.  It’s sort of like the look you see in a mad dog’s eyes, like they’re seeing something you and me can’t.”

 

Doc shakes his head, looking every day of his seventy-two years.  “It’s a damned shame, Dean, what that boy’s been through, but it makes him dangerous, and I don’t need to tell you this isn’t the best time for you to be taking more on your plate.”

 

“You think I should send him along?”

 

“A-yeah,” Doc affirms in his broad, flat note.  “I could probably see about getting him work in K.C. if you’re interested.  It wouldn’t be anything fancy, but he’d be safe enough from the likes of Barnes, I expect.”

 

Dean feels a tightening of his breath so sudden that it makes him dizzy and he has to take a few deep breaths before he can answer.  “If you can help, Doc, I’d be grateful.  I don’t mind telling you he makes me a little uneasy.  And Sam could certainly do without the…influence.”

 

“Consider it done, Dean.  I’ll make some inquiries by telegraph and let you know as soon as I’ve heard back.  It probably won’t be for several days,” he warns, smacking the table and standing up.  “But we’ll get this squared away.”

 

“Thank you, Doc,” Dean answers, rising himself and taking a step to shake the old doctor’s hand.  “If there’s anything I can do to repay your kindness, I’d—“

 

“Nonsense, Dean.  I’ve known you since you were knee high to a grasshopper.  There’s no debt between friends.  Just take care of your granddaddy.” 

 

The Doc bends to retrieve his medical bag and sets it on the table to open it.  He draws out one of his ubiquitous home remedy bottles and hands it to Dean. 

 

“Give him two tablespoons of this twice a day, once just before bed and once in the morning when he wakes.  It’ll help ease the pain and maybe clear his mind.  I have to tell you, his mind is wandering, Dean.  Half the time I was in there, he was talking nonsense.  Don’t pay him any mind.  Just give him his medicine and help keep him comfortable.  If you need any help, send word to me, and I’ll see that someone comes to keep vigil with you.”

 

Ordinarily, there’d be a passel of women already on the porch and in the parlor, knitting or sewing and talking, talking, talking in low, death-room voices, taking turns one after the other at Grandfather’s bedside.  It’s a testament to their distance from town—and their general distance from folks all around—that Dean’s more or less alone except for Sam in this time of crisis.

“We’ll be fine,” Dean answers, shaking the doctor’s hand again.  “And thank you again for coming.”

 

“It was no trouble, Dean.  I was out to the Becker place anyway.”

 

They’re on the porch now, and Dean blames it on the cool early spring breeze that he’s suddenly cold all through at the mention of the name.

 

“How is Judith?” Dean asks, hoping he doesn’t sound as odd as he feels.

 

“About as you’d expect,” Doc answers, tsking and shaking his head vigorously.  “It’s a terrible thing, Dean.  I don’t know what this world is coming to when a girl can’t be safe in her own home.”

 

Dean nods, putting on an appropriately sober expression.  “I’m praying for her,” he says, just before he calls to Sam to bring the doctor’s horse.

 

There’s a minute or two of silence and then Sam appears, leading the doctor’s old gray gelding.  Sam helps Doc Jennings into the saddle and hands him up his bag, and Doc says something to his brother that Dean doesn’t quite catch.

 

Sam’s face takes on that stiff look he gets when he’s hiding his real feelings, and then he gives a tight little smile and steps back so Doc can move away.

 

When horse and rider are just a dust-cloud heading toward town, Sam seems to shake himself out of a daze, looking to Dean where he stands on the porch.

 

It’s dusk now, that indeterminate time when the light plays tricks with distance and shadow, but for a single moment, it seems to Dean like Sam is crying.

 

Then his brother turns abruptly toward the barn, before Dean can say a word, and jogs away.

 

Dean’s in with Grandfather when Sam comes in with the plate, but he hears the slam of the screen door, the sound of the dishes in the sink being washed, and when he comes out a few minutes later, they’ve all been dried and put away, and there’s no sign at all of Sam.

 

Reluctant to leave his grandfather alone—and, if he’d admit it, not entirely comfortable with being alone in the dark with Sam—Dean sits at the kitchen table for a long while, half hoping Sam will come back inside, half fearing that he might.

 

Eventually, when it becomes clear that Sam intends to stay in the barn again, Dean sighs and gets up to light the oil lamp and fetch a lantern.  Sam can’t sleep out there.  Dean might need his help with Grandfather. 

 

And Sam might need an alibi.

 

Trying to ignore the dread that that thought raises in him, Dean slips out onto the porch, careful not to let the screen door bang behind him.  He sniffs the air, wondering if the last of winter’s cold might be returning, considering whether or not to bring in wood for the kitchen stove.  They hadn’t needed a fire the last few nights—it’s like that on the plains sometimes in April—but it might just be that they’re still in for some frost.

Recognizing that he’s stalling, Dean squares his shoulders and takes a deep breath, stalking toward the barn with purpose he doesn’t actually feel. 

 

Sam is nowhere to be found, which isn’t out of the ordinary, but with recent events and night coming on, Dean is uneasy.

 

“Sam!” he calls into the darkness beyond the hay doors, peering out fruitlessly across fallow fields and toward the farther acres he’ll have to start plowing next week.  Nothing moves against the pale strip of horizon still underlit by the setting sun, and Dean breathes out—relief or weariness, maybe both—and leans against the doorjamb, facing out into that vast, unknowable distance.

 

Once, Dean had taken pleasure in imagining that land settled, abundant with prosperous people who would seek him out for counsel, come to his church on Sunday with their children, turn their hopeful faces heavenward in holy song.

 

He’d grown up since then, learned that his horizons were closer than his visions would entice him to believe.  Learned that he was confined by more than simple domestic considerations.

 

The world was changing, and Dean’s dream didn’t fit it anymore.

 

“Hey,” he hears, soft from behind him, but Dean doesn’t turn to look at his little brother.

 

Sam must take that as an invitation, for he comes up close behind Dean and rests his chin on Dean’s shoulder. 

 

There’s no other point of contact, but Dean feels Sam there like an enormous weight, pinning him to the earth, feels the heat of his brother’s closeness creeping through his veins like ground fire.

 

“Grandfather’s dying,” Dean says without realizing he’s going to, and he feels Sam’s affirmative nod against his shoulder.  It moves him, moves through him, until he can’t resist turning, wanting to see Sam’s face, to see in it something of his own grief and fear.

 

Instead, he finds surety and satisfaction, like Sam has gotten something he’s always wanted, and Dean feels a spike of awareness arc through him even as his little brother raises a hand to cup the back of his head and drag him forward, an inexorable, inevitable few inches, until their lips are sharing breath but not touching.

 

With the clarity that comes of an unexpected alteration in a man’s understanding of the world, Dean recognizes his moment of temptation, knows that he can suspend it just here, with anticipation singing in his veins, sparking in his blood and bringing his breath up short.

 

Or he can fall, once and forever, taking Sam with him—Sam, who he loves as a brother and as something else, something ancient that even the prophets only speak of in indefinite words.

 

 _Because there are no words_ , Dean thinks as the heat of Sam’s lips touch his at last, flaring through him like sheet lightning, burning away any last doubt.

 

No words for what it does to him to have Sam’s pliant mouth on his, his tongue taking bold strokes along his closed lips, making Dean moan and open to him, both of them finally silenced by the slide of their tongues, overwhelming and impossible and right.

The heat scorches Dean’s cheeks, tightens in his belly until he thinks he might relive one of his darker dreams right here in the aisle of the barn.  Sam’s tongue mimics another motion, one Dean has felt only in shameful release when one of his dreams took him over and he couldn’t get free without using his hand.

 

To have the dream now, when he’s awake, to feel Sam’s shoulders under his hands, their bodies still separated by a hand’s breadth while their mouths devour and remake Dean’s world. 

 

There are no words.

 

So deeply are they engaged in exploring the forbidden territory of each other’s mouths, they don’t hear Lucas until he’s a few feet away, his feet clumsy on the floor where they’re usually quiet.

 

Dean pulls back first, Sam following him with his eyes closed, lips roughed red and cheeks blooming with stubble burn.

 

He looks like every image of sin their Grandfather has ever evoked, but for that moment, Dean can feel nothing but triumph.

 

Riding the high, he turns toward Lucas with a half-smile, smug and victorious, like he’s won something from the other, whose own smile suggests that the strange boy has won far more by this apparent loss.

 

That unsettles Dean, but before he can ask Lucas what the hell he thinks he’s smiling at, Sam says, “Are you in for the night?” in a manner that suggests Sam has a better idea of the other boy’s nocturnal wanderings than he’s let on before now.

 

Lucas nods and then ghosts the tips of his fingers across his own lips, as though he’s been sharing in their illicit kiss himself.

 

“You should get some sleep,” Sam says, nodding toward the loft ladder.

 

Lucas shrugs.  “I’m not tired.  I slept a lot of the day.”

 

“Where were you?” Dean manages at last, his lips feeling strange, still buzzing with contact.

 

“Here and there,” Lucas answers, smile growing mischievous.  “I see things,” he adds with a vague hand gesture that takes in the barn, Sam and Dean, the fields beyond them.

 

The world.

 

“You need to be careful about where you go,” Dean continues, as if he’s got any real control over the conversation.  “People hereabouts are suspicious of strangers, and you’ve got a reputation for being…different.  Best keep to the barn for the next few days.”

 

“So you have me to hand when you want to send me away?”  And Dean knows by the boy’s tone that somehow Lucas overheard the conversation in the kitchen with Doc Jennings.

  
Or Sam did, and he’d wasted no time relaying it to Lucas.

 

Whatever the case, Dean sees no need to deny it.  “Yes.  Doctor Jennings has friends in K.C. who can help you get situated.  Make a place for yourself.  Have a life of your own.  There’s not much here to offer a young man like you, who’s already seen so much of the world.”

 

“What if I don’t want to go?”  Lucas’ eyes are all for Sam, and Dean feels his brother shift beside him.

 

“We can’t keep you here forever, Lucas.  Grandfather’s not well, and there’s work to be done.”

 

“I can work,” Lucas asserts, smile finally sliding from his face.  He looks young and afraid all of a sudden, and Dean feels a pang of misgiving.  A single glance at Sam’s face drives away his sympathy, though.  Sam looks torn, like he can’t decide by whose side he should be standing.

 

“We couldn’t pay you, and as I said, Sweetbranch doesn’t offer much of a life for a young man.”

 

“Like Sam?”

 

Too late, Dean sees the trap.  His little brother shifts a step toward Lucas, eyes on the floor, as if he’s unsure who to look at.  It robs Dean of heat, makes him cold all at once.

 

“Sam’s got me,” Dean says aloud, his meaning unmistakable. 

 

“Does he?”  Lucas’ mellow voice is taunting.

 

“He does.”

 

“Neither of you can stay here in that case,” Lucas gloats, voice ugly and old, like he’s not a boy at all.  “Brother-fucking preachers don’t fare so well in small towns, I’m told.”

 

It’s meant to shock, and it does, spiking through Dean’s blood and making his heart pound wildly in the cage of his ribs.  This is what they’ll say, the people he’s known his whole life, what they’ll see when Dean walks through town.  Not the righteous shepherd who leads his flock to glory but a sinner whose soul is blackened worse than any devil’s by the crime that he’s committed against God and family.

  
It should matter more than it does to Dean, but right now, he can’t think about it.  He has eyes only for Sam, for what his little brother is going to choose on this lowly ground where the animals shift and murmur in their dark stalls and the air is sweet and heavy with hay and manure.

 

Dean sees the instant  Sam decides, sees Sam’s head come up, his eyes wide as he takes in what Lucas has called them, stepping back so that his shoulder brushes Dean’s, hand seeking his big brother’s without hesitation, palm warm and solid against Dean’s own.

 

With his brother close beside him, Dean says, “There’s nothing here for you, Lucas.”

 

But the smile is back, the wicked one that says the boy knows more than he’ll let on.  It makes Dean afraid, even with Sam’s hand in his, even with things decided now between the two of them. 

 

“We’ll see,” is all Lucas answers, turning away suddenly to glide to the ladder and climb to the loft.  A second later, the lantern that had been burning there goes out, and Dean makes out the sounds of the other boy settling in for sleep.

 

“I’ll take care of the animals,” Sam offers, “And then I’ll be in.”

 

Dean examines Sam’s face, wondering if he should trust Sam out here with Lucas.  He can tell that’s what Sam is waiting to see—if Dean trusts him.

 

So he nods, though it feels strange, his neck stiff with tension, and says, “Don’t be long,” letting the fingers of his right hand brush across Sam’s back as he moves away toward the front of the barn and the house beyond.

 

“I won’t,” Sam answers softly, every element of a promise in the two simple words. 

 

Dean shivers and feels that promise as a liquid heat pooling in his belly.

 

*****

 

Grandfather’s bad that night, though, shouting from his room and thrashing weakly on the bed, leaching all the heat out of Dean and making him feel guilty for what he’d been thinking of doing in the room just above where Dean sits, reading the bible to his Grandfather and trying to soothe away the worst of his delirium.

 

Grandfather’s words are full of wickedness, as if every sin ever confessed to him, every ugliness he’s drawn from his people like poison from a festering wound, is spewing out of him now.

 

And interspersed between the accusations he levels at Dean and the things he says about Sam—terrible things, things that Dean shuts his heart against, though he cannot close his ears—planted like nettle in the vicious crop are dire admonitions against wolves at the door.

 

At one point in the deep part of the night, when the world is still, even the wind in the eaves only a suggestion of keening, Grandfather whispers, “You’re a lamb in the fold, Dean.  You’re a lamb led to slaughter.  The wolf’s mouth will devour you. You’re lost.” 

 

His tears fall in streams, wetting the thin hair at his temples, darkening the pillow around his head.

 

Dean shushes him and recites Psalm 23, half hoping it ushers his Grandfather off before he has to hear any more of these words that shiver him like clammy hands at his throat.

 

“Lost,” his Grandfather murmurs, “Lost,” following him down into a strange half-sleep, his eyes lidded, pupils showing white, hands twitching on the quilt.

 

Dean senses his brother behind him and rises, stretching the stiffness out of his back and turning slowly to look at Sam.

 

Sam’s face is a study in conflict, his eyes ranging from Pawpa back to Dean, expression altering as it does from a cold kind of acceptance to a warmer compassion. 

 

“Can’t you love him just a little?” Dean asks, his voice wavering with exhaustion and sorrow.  They’re in the kitchen but not sitting, standing at station, like soldiers too weary to return to their beds.

 

Sam shakes his head and reaches out a hand for Dean, who doesn’t remember later having crossed the space between them, only recalls the heat of his brother, the strength of his arms, the words he whispered in damp bursts against Dean’s neck.

 

When he realizes what they’re doing, what it’s leading to, Dean pushes away and shakes his head, runs a trembling hand over his mouth, says, “No.  Not tonight.”

 

Sam’s tight-lipped nod answers.  “I’ll keep vigil for awhile, Dean.”

 

That leads to Dean’s long scrutiny of Sam’s face.  “Can you read to him?” Dean asks at last.

 

Sam nods and takes the bible from the table, handling it gingerly, like he expects it to hurt him somehow.

  
“Old Testament or New?”

 

“Try Psalms,” Dean suggests, shoulders slumping at last with giving in.

 

“Get some sleep, Dean,” Sam answers, pausing as he brushes past Dean to touch him once on the point of his near cheek.

 

Dean lies down, but sleep won’t come to him.  He can hear Sam’s voice droning through the floor below him and finds himself trying to determine what Sam’s reading.  Sometimes, the rhythm of Sam’s reading is broken by a querulous, low murmur, and Dean knows Grandfather is awake.

 

It’s still dark when Dean is jerked awake by a shout from below, and he throws himself from bed and struggles into his boots to pound down the stairs to find Sam standing there, face pale, eyes on the kitchen door, which is flung open, the screen door slapping fitfully in its crooked frame.

 

“What is it, Sam?”

 

Sam shakes his head.  “There was a wind…”

 

It’s impossible that the wind could have pulled open the heavy kitchen door, though Dean hears it howling around the house, pelting the windows with grit from the drive, like a thousand fingernails tapping, tapping.

 

Shivering, he approaches the door, wishing the wind would die down so he could hear, convinced that someone’s out there, hiding in the dark.

 

It’s pitch black, moonless, and the wind seems only to increase its fury as Dean takes cautious steps, heart thundering in his chest against the unnamed fear that’s taken up lodging there.

 

He discovers he’s whispering a prayer, ripped from his mouth by the penetrating wind as he reaches for the screen door to refasten it.

 

Because he expects a hand to grasp his wrist or a face to loom out of the darkness, he’s ready when he sees Lucas at the edge of the porch, standing with his back to the house.  He might be speaking.  Dean thinks he hears a flowing tongue, as if the boy is addressing the wind, but he can’t make out the words and isn’t sure, anyway, against the wind’s rising shriek.

“Get to the barn!” He shouts at Lucas’ back, unwilling to step out into the maelstrom, even with what scant shelter the porch offers.  There’s something malevolent at work in the wind.  Dean knows that’s superstitious nonsense, but he can’t help the fear that nails his feet to the lintel.

 

“Go on!” he cries again, reaching, reaching for the door handle, wishing the boy would move or say something, anything but his eerie stillness moved only by the buffeting wind.

 

Then Sam’s there behind him, saying in a voice Dean hears only because his brother’s beside him:  “Get back to the barn, Lucas.  Get out of the wind.”

 

There’s no way the other boy hears Sam, no way at all, but Lucas moves—down the steps, across the yard to the drive, along the drive to the barn, his motions untouched by the fierce hand of the storm that’s summoning dust devils all around him.

 

Dean shivers and pulls the screen door to, shoves the storm door in place and locks it, then stumbles back into the room, coming up against his brother, whose steadying arms go around him for a moment before Dean remembers himself and steps away.

 

“What was that all about?” Dean asks gruffly, blustering through his lingering fear.

 

Sam shrugs, something secret in his eyes.  “Storm’s coming,” he observes idly, turning to move back down the hall to Grandfather’s room.

 

“Don’t,” Dean says, unsure what he means.  Sam must not understand, either, because he turns back to his brother and raises an inquiring eyebrow.

 

“Just…”  Dean falters, thrown off by being brought so abruptly from what little sleep he’d managed and spooked through and through by the weird moment with Lucas.  “Stay here for a minute,” he finishes lamely, sinking into the chair facing the door.

 

Sam comes around Dean to sit at his left hand, at right angles to him, his face straight ahead so that Dean can only see half of his expression.

 

It must be his imagination that Sam seems indifferent to Dean’s feelings.  This Sam doesn’t bear any resemblance to the one who held Dean only a short time before or to the Sam who’d kissed him breathless in the barn, breaking open their secret sin and making Dean shake with longing.

 

“What’s going on with you, Sam?”

 

Still his brother doesn’t look at him, and foreboding wraps its cold hand around Dean’s heart and squeezes.

 

“Someone else has been hurt,” Sam says at last, flattening his palms against the table and staring straight ahead.  “I Saw it,” he explains, as if he expects to be believed without question.

 

But Dean’s full of questions, and he doesn’t like this stranger at the table, wants to shake Sam free of the pall of calm that seems to have muffled in him all human feeling.

 

“What are you talking about, Sam?  You can’t see things like that.  You can’t know that someone’s been—“

“I have, Dean.  I can.  I told you Lucas was giving me things.  He gave me the Sight, Dean.  I can see more now than Grandfather ever could.”

 

There’s a gloating pride in Sam’s last words, but Dean doesn’t let it distract him.

 

“What do you mean Lucas has been giving you things, Sam.  What things?  What did he do to you?”  He can’t help the accusation in his tone.  Like the storm winds, fierce jealousy had swept through him when Sam had mentioned Lucas, and what will Dean had had to control his feelings seems to have been stripped from him when he’d at last surrendered to the temptation of his brother’s mouth.

 

Finally, Sam looks at him, but it’s a self-satisfied smirk on his face, not the reassuring smile Dean had hoped to find there.

 

“He touched me, Dean, and I Saw.”

 

Dean shudders, suddenly cold, all the heat of his jealousy drained from the blow of that single word.

 

“Touched?”  Dean knows how he sounds, doesn’t care, can’t breathe for the choking sense of loss.

 

“With his hand, Dean,” Sam explains, as though to a slow-witted child.  “Here.”  Sam touches the place just above and between his eyes.  For a dizzying second Dean feels that touch on his own forehead, remembers the cold iron of Grandfather’s cross burned into his skin with the Reverend’s death-touched finger.

 

“I can See everything,” Sam continues, wonder and excitement making their way into his face.  He still doesn’t look like Dean’s little brother, but it’s an improvement over the supercilious sneer he’d been wearing before.  “I know what’s going to happen next, Dean. I can tell you.  I can help you build a church.”

 

Dean startles visibly, and Sam’s smile turns knowing.  “You thought I didn’t know about that?  I know a lot more than you think, Dean.”  Again, it’s as if he’s chiding a child who should know better than to doubt him.  “Let me help you, Dean.  Let me use the gifts Lucas has given me.  You’ll see.  You’ll see that he isn’t bad.”

 

Dean doesn’t think he’ll see any such thing, but he’s too tired and shaken to argue with Sam.  With the wind shrieking and keening in the eaves, insinuating itself under the doorjamb and through cracks in the ill-fitting windows, the house has grown cold, which only mirrors how Dean feels at Sam’s revelations.  He doesn’t trust Lucas’ intentions, doesn’t believe he means Sam any good, but he knows by the fanatical light in Sam’s eyes that his little brother won’t hear a word against Lucas, no matter that Sam chose Dean only hours before in that still, unbreathing moment in the barn.

 

“We’ll see, Sam.  Let’s just take it a day at a time.  You said someone was hurt.  Can you tell me who?”

 

The first crack of uncertainty breaks its way across Sam’s face, and some of the light leaks from his eyes.  He shakes his head. “No,” and he seems unsettled by that.  “But I know it was a girl.  She was beaten, and he—you know.”

 

Grateful that he hadn’t eaten much at supper, Dean feels his stomach flip uneasily at Sam’s words.  “Who did it?”

 

“It wasn’t Lucas,” Sam says promptly, as though Dean had accused the boy.  Dean has his doubts about Sam’s answer.  Else, why was the boy on their porch in the storm?  He shouldn’t have been out at all.

 

Dean doesn’t want to pursue it, though, not now.  He asks instead, “But you can’t tell who did it?”

 

Again, Sam’s face is darkened by doubt.  “No,” he answers slowly, shaking his head again, as though he can somehow loosen the Sight and break the answers free from unknowing.

 

“Maybe it was a dream, Sam,” Dean offers hopefully.  “Maybe you imagined it.”

 

“No!”  The vehement denial is accompanied by Sam’s fist striking the table.

 

Behind him, down the hall, Dean hears Grandfather stirring feebly, his warbling voice calling for him.

 

He’s glad of the interruption, and he goes swiftly, without another word to Sam, to find his Grandfather half-uncovered and shivering in his cold room.

 

Dean covers him, gets a quilt from the wardrobe and adds that to the bed, pats Grandfather’s hands under the heavy layers of blankets.  “Sleep, Pawpa,” Dean says quietly.  “Sleep.”

 

The old man’s eyes flutter shut, and Dean breathes out a long sigh of relief.  He needs to rest.

 

Sam’s gone from the kitchen when Dean returns, however, and if his little brother isn’t upstairs, Dean can’t very well go to sleep himself.  Someone has to be awake to wait on Grandfather.

 

But he finds Sam in their room, sitting on Dean’s bed, eyes hopeful on the doorway as Dean enters the room.

 

“Sam,” Dean starts, heartbeat clattering up into his throat with the implication of his brother’s position in the room.

 

They can’t.  Not here.  Not now.

 

“It’s okay, Dean.  Just for a minute.”  Sam pats the bed and rises, indicating that Dean should get under the covers.

 

Shrugging slowly out of his heavy flannel, toeing off his boots and shucking his pants, Dean crawls into bed, his back muscles protesting as he at last relaxes them. 

 

Sam climbs in next to him, his length and breadth too much for the narrow mattress, but Dean makes room, shoving up against the cold exterior wall, happy enough for the discomfort if it’s balanced by the furnace of his brother’s embrace.  Sam pulls him close, nudges a knee between Dean’s thighs, and breathes, “Sleep,” against his temple, where he follows his command with a kiss.  “I’ll listen for Grandfather.”

 

Dean nods, means to say something about all this, about the newness and the strangeness of it—they haven’t shared a bed since Sam was small—but he never gets to the words, sleep dropping on him like a tree limb, unexpected and heavy.

He awakes alone, his nose sharp with cold, and staggers out of bed and into pants, boots, and heavy shirt, scraping frost off the inside of the window to see a low sky, rising sun turning it bruised yellow, and a black line of towering clouds bullying its way across the plains.

 

Sam is loading the stove in the kitchen when Dean comes in and gives him a smile, nodding toward the pot on the stovetop, coffee-scented steam issuing from its enameled spout.

 

Hot cup in hand, Dean slips down the hall to Grandfather’s room and peeks in to see the old man still asleep, chest rising and falling reassuringly under the faded crazy quilt.

 

Back in the kitchen, Sam has started breakfast.  Dean watches Sam’s efficient movements, the way he slices the bread, sets it to toast, cracks eggs into the pan next to the bacon, where it all snaps and sizzles.  He feels odd, like their roles are reversed in more ways than one, not just that Sam has taken over Dean’s usual morning duties but that his brother has somehow come into an understanding of the world that has been kept from Dean himself.

 

Trying to shake off the idea that he’s being left behind somehow, Dean smiles his thanks to Sam as his little brother fills a plate and sets it in front of him and then settles across from him.  They eat in companionable silence, which is when Dean first notices the stillness out of doors, the utter absence of wind an omen that forebodes nothing good.

 

“Feels like the world’s holding its breath,” he remarks unexpectedly, and Sam makes an affirmative noise around a mouthful of bacon.

 

When breakfast is just a streak of grease on his plate, Sam rises like he’s going to do the dishes, but Dean stops him with a hand over his where it grasps the edge of his plate.

  
“I can do that, Sam.  You cooked.  It’s only fair.”

 

Sam shakes his head.  “I want to.  Let me.”

 

Dean peers into his brother’s face, curious about the change in him, and thinks he sees a sign of guilt in the way one corner of Sam’s mouth turns down.

 

“What are you hiding, Sam?”  He asks it gently, not wanting to set his brother off or send him into a sullen silence.  He’s enjoying too much their new closeness to ruin it with accusations.

 

Sam ducks his head and slides his hand out from under Dean’s, mutters, “Nothing,” and turns toward the sink with his own plate.

 

Dean rises and comes to stand beside Sam, where they stare, apparently sightless, out the kitchen window toward the barn.

 

“Did you go out last night, Sam?”  He practically holds his breath to hear the answer.

 

But Sam shakes his head.  “No.”

 

“Did he?” Dean asks, jerking his chin in the direction of the barn.

 

Sam might as well be stone for all the answer he gives, which is answer enough, Dean knows.

Letting out a breath, Dean shakes his head, watching Sam out of the corner of his eye.  “And what’ll we tell the sheriff when he comes with another posse to see about Lucas’ whereabouts during the attack you say happened last night?”

 

“He didn’t do it, Dean.”

 

“You can’t know that, Sam.”

 

“I know,” Sam asserts, setting the plate down in the sink too hard.  Dean watches a crack snake its way across the pattern of rosebuds in the center. 

 

“Sorry,” Sam says then, voice quiet, and Dean gets the sense that his brother’s apologizing for more than just broken china.

 

“What did you do, Sam?”  Dean turns his head to look at Sam’s profile.

 

“Nothing,” he answers, too loud in the unnatural quiet.  “Nothing,” he says, lower, shaking his head and staring blindly out the window.

 

“Then why are you so guilty?”

 

Sam does look at him then, eyes surprised, and Dean chuckles.  “I might not have your special skills, Sam, but I’ve been an apprentice preacher for a long time, long enough to see guilt in a man when he’s done something he’s ashamed of.”

 

Sam lets out a breath like a condemned man might blow before the noose tightens around his throat and turns to look at Dean, who’s still facing the sink and the window.  He’s always liked the view in the morning, watching the colors God paints on the horizon with the sunrise.

 

Today, the sky is violent with color, unsoothing, but still, Dean watches out of habit, thinking that it’s an omen he’d do well to heed yet knowing he will not.

 

“I—“  Sam looks so stricken, Dean almost relents, but he manages to stay quiet, biding his time.

 

“I gave Grandfather an extra dose of the medicine.  To keep him quiet.  I knew you needed your sleep, and I didn’t want him waking you.  It didn’t do any harm, Dean.  I checked on him every quarter hour just to be sure.”

 

On the one hand, Dean should be angry that Sam would take such a risk with an old man whose health is already so fragile.  On the other, he’s touched that his brother was worried enough to want Dean to get some rest.  And Dean can’t argue that he does feel better.  A few hours of uninterrupted sleep seem to have become a luxury these days.

 

“It’s alright, Sam.  You didn’t do any harm.  But don’t do it again.  We don’t know if Pawpa’s health can take it.”

 

Sam nods, smiles, leans over to give Dean a chaste, dry kiss on the cheek.  “I love you,” Dean thinks he hears, but Sam is already pivoting, long legs carrying him to the door and then out to the yard, where Dean watches him walk to the barn, swing open the big doors, and then stop in the aisle, likely calling to raise Lucas.

He watches, too, as Sam climbs the ladder, disappearing from Dean’s view as he nears the fourth rung from the bottom.

 

When Sam doesn’t return for Lucas’ plate, Dean starts to get worried about the boy.  At least, that’s what he tells himself as he shrugs into his barn coat and puts on his woolen hat.  He maintains that delusion until he reaches the barn, where he can neither see nor hear his brother.

  
“Sam?” He calls, resisting the urge to sneak up the ladder and spy. 

 

“He’s not here, Dean,” Sam calls back from the loft, appearing at the top of the ladder with a broken lantern in his hand.  “Something happened.”

 

“What do you mean?” Dean asks, coming to the bottom of the ladder and starting to climb.  But a gesture from Sam stops him only two rungs up, and he climbs back down to wait impatiently while Sam moves around the loft and eventually climbs down himself.

 

“It almost looks like there was a struggle of some kind.  His pallet is overturned and the lantern was broken—oil everywhere. We’re lucky the whole barn didn’t go up.”

 

“Who’d have come out here in the middle of the night, Sam?  We saw Lucas ‘round about three in the morning.  It’s only seven now.  It doesn’t seem like—“

 

“What if the same person attacked Lucas that hurt that girl last night?”

 

“Now, what sense does that make, Sam?  Why’d anybody like that want to hurt Lucas?”

 

Sam shakes his head, a helpless look on his face, and it both breaks Dean’s heart and makes him a little angry.  He doesn’t like the sway this boy seems to have on his brother.

 

“I’m sure there’s another explanation, Sam.  Maybe he kicked over the lantern and stumbled over his pallet in the dark.  We’ll just have to wait for him to come back and tell us himself.”

 

Sam seems ready to argue, but he’s distracted at that moment by the sight of something behind Dean.

 

Dean turns around to see riders coming up the lane.  Sighing, suddenly feeling like he’d gotten no sleep at all, Dean takes off his cap, rubs the sleep from his scalp, and replaces it, saying, voice heavy with resignation, “I’ll go talk to them.”

 

“I’ll come, too,” Sam answers. 

 

“No.”  Dean can’t say why, but he’s filled with a sudden anxiety.  He doesn’t want the men looking at Sam.  “No, you just stay here.  Out of sight.  Why don’t you let the mules out to the paddock and muck the stalls?  If I need you, I’ll call for you.”

 

“I want to stand by you, Dean.  I’ve got no reason to act guilty.”

 

“Just trust me on this, little brother, would you?”

 

“Yeah, alright,” Sam says after a long, reluctant pause.  “But you call me if you need me.”

 

As he catches the expression on Bud Grady’s face, though, Dean knows he won’t be calling Sam.  Knox and Jones are with him, and another man, one that Dean recognizes only as a newcomer, one whose family hadn’t taken any interest in the Winchesters or their church.

 

“What can I do for you this morning, Bud?”

 

“I need to see that boy in the barn, Dean.  I’m afraid there’s been another attack, and someone said they saw him leaving the farm where it happened.”

 

“Whose farm?”

 

“You don’t need to know that, Dean.  Just get the boy.”

 

“Now wait just a minute, Bud.  We’ve known each other for years.  You’re talking to me like I’ve done something wrong, or like I mean to, and you know me better than that.  What’s going on here?”

 

“The Sheriff asked you to do something, boy.  You’d best get to it.”

 

This from the stranger, a tall, lean man, pockmarked face divided by a hatchet blade of a nose, eyes shadowed by a wide-brimmed black slouch hat.  His hands are red and raw, a workingman’s hands, and he sits his horse like he’s more comfortable behind it than astride.

 

“I don’t think we’ve had proper introductions,” Dean tries, giving the man a steady look.  
  
The man’s only answer is to spit a stream of yellow tobacco juice into the dust between Dean’s feet.  It’s an impressive distance and sharp aim, and at another time, Dean might have commented on it, except that it’s so obviously intended as an insult.

 

“Now look here, sir.  This is my property, my farm you’re on.  I think you need to show me a little respect, or you can just move along.”

 

“Dean,” Bud warns, weariness and something else—something like fear—back in his voice.

 

Dean swings his gaze back to the sheriff.  “You bring a man here to insult me while my grandfather—your pastor—lies yonder on his deathbed, Bud?”  He lays it on thick, with just the right balance of righteous disapproval and wounded friendship.

 

Bud shifts uncomfortably in his saddle and nods his head like he’s been having a conversation with himself.

 

“This here’s Roger Cornant, Dean.  He and his wife, Jeanette, and their two kids moved just east of Sweetbranch three months ago.  He’s got a daughter, Juliet.  She’s thirteen, Dean.”  Bud stops there, letting Dean arrive at his own conclusions about what else he has to say.

 

Dean says, “Lord have mercy,” as a prayer and returns his gaze to the aggrieved father’s.  “I’m sorry for what’s happened, sir.  I can assure you neither I nor mine have anything to do with it.  Bud, you’re welcome to look in the barn, but when Sam and I went out this morning, we discovered Lucas was gone.  The loft is a mess.  I don’t know what happened to him.”

 

Bud nods tightly, dismounts, hands the reins to Jones and gives Knox a hard look.  “Stay here and keep quiet.  Reverend Winchester is poorly.”

 

Dean accompanies Bud to the barn but waits in the aisle while the sheriff investigates the loft.

 

He does a thorough job, descending several minutes later with a grim look on his face and the broken lantern in one hand.  “What do you think this is about, Dean?”

 

Dean shakes his head.  “I don’t know, Bud, I surely do not.  Sam and I were up by turns taking care of Grandfather.  When the wind come up so strong last night, it blew open the kitchen door, and we saw Lucas on the porch.  That was nigh around three o’clock.  We told him to go to bed, and he did.  Least, we saw him go into the barn.  I was up by seven this morning, Sam up before me, but neither of us checked the loft until just before you got here.  In fact, that’s why we were in the barn when you rode up.”

 

“That about your way of seeing things, too, Sam?” Bud asks, looking past Dean toward Balaam’s stall.

 

Dean turns to see Sam leaning with his wrists crossed over the rake handle just inside the stall door. 

 

“Yessir,” he answers promptly.  “I came out to collect the eggs this morning and feed and water the mules and Custer, but I didn’t check the loft.  I figured Lucas was sleeping.”

 

“What time did the attack occur?” Dean asks, all casual concern.

 

Bud shoots him a tight-lipped grimace, though, and Dean feels his breakfast slosh uneasily in his belly.  Bud Grady doesn’t trust them.

 

Or maybe just Sam. 

 

When they get to the yard, before they reach the other three men, Bud says, quiet and out of the corner of his mouth.  “It was about half past four, we reckon.  Juliet’s in no fit state to tell us anything, but her mother heard a thud that woke her up, and the clock chimed the half-hour just after the noise.  When she went to check on Juliet, that’s when she saw what had happened.  She had the wherewithal to look out the open window and saw a boy runnin’ off around the corner of the barn.  She said he had dark hair and was tall and slender.  She said she thought he was an Injun.”

 

“No saying he wasn’t,” Dean observes mildly as they arrive back at the group of riders.

 

“True enough.”  Grady takes the reins from Jones and remounts.  “Look, Dean, I’m going to have to talk to that boy.  Soon as he comes back here, I want you to send Sam in to get me, you hear?  I’ll be at the office all day.”

 

Dean nods, though he hates the thought of letting Sam ride into town alone, given all that’s been happening.

 

“That’s it?” Cornant protests, jabbing a finger in Dean’s direction.  “You’re going to let him go, just like that?”

 

“Now, Mr. Cornant, Dean doesn’t fit your wife’s description, and besides, I know the man.  He’s not capable of this kind of thing.  And he and his brother were here all night, tending to their ailing Granddaddy, the Reverend Winchester.  If it’s anyone we need to see here, it’s Lucas Volkov, and Mr. Winchester has promised he’ll send for me as soon as the boy turns up.  That’s the best I can do right now, ‘less you want to start a search party for him, and I don’t think that’d do much good.  I know waitin’s hard, sir, but that’s the best we can do.”

 

Without waiting for a response from the other man, Bud turns his horse around and heads back up the lane toward the road, Jones and Knox following suit.  Cornant lingers like he’s going to say something more to Dean, but at last he seems to recognize that he’s alone in his suspicions, and with a disgusted noise, he turns his horse and trots off in the wake of the other three.

 

Dean lets out a long breath, scratches his head through the cap, and heads wearily back to the barn to help Sam finish the mucking.

 

It’s a quiet sort of day, carrying on like it started in a strange, oppressive dullness, like the air is heavier than usual, squeezing sounds out of the world.

 

It’d be a decent enough day for plowing, Dean considers, what with the wind gone for a rare change, but he can’t find the gumption, even if he didn’t have the task of waiting for Lucas to show up. 

 

He and Sam finish the mule’s stalls in silence, Sam starting on Custer’s without being asked as Dean’s wheeling the last barrow of manure from Samson’s stall out the hay doors to the curing pile.

 

As Dean’s pushing the barrow up the dirt loading ramp, he sees Sam with his back to the doors, hands gesturing, hears his brother’s tone but not his words, and knows that Lucas has returned.

 

“Where were you?” He hears clearly as he enters the barn, the barrow’s wheel loud in the sudden hush as both boys look at him, Sam over his shoulder, Lucas with a cool expression that suggests Dean is interrupting.

 

“Sam asked you a question,” Dean observes, parking the barrow in its usual place, tucked in between the feed bin and the outside wall of Custer’s stall.

 

“One he already knows the answer to,” Lucas says in his thick, elusive accent.

 

“I don’t know where you were,” Sam denies, taking a step back toward Dean, who has taken a step forward to better read Lucas’ narrow, keen-eyed face.

 

“You should.  You were there yourself,” Lucas continues, sliding his tongue over his teeth and grinning.  There’s something feral in his expression, like a cornered animal that intends to give as much harm as it gets, and Dean has the irrational urge to reach out and pull Sam back behind him.

  
He leaves his hands where they are, though, half-curled into fists at his sides.

 

“I wasn’t, Dean,” Sam pleads, and Dean wants to believe Sam.  But something in Lucas’ gaze is too direct, like he can’t be bothered lying because he knows the truth will do more harm.

 

“Sam?” Dean asks, willing his brother to reassure him.

 

“I wasn’t there, Dean.  I was here with you and Grandfather all night.  You know that!  You told Sheriff Grady the same thing.”

 

Dean watches Lucas’ face, not Sam’s, sees the other boy eat up the information he hadn’t had from Sam yet and didn’t know already.

 

So there are some things the strange boy’s “gifts” can’t give him.

 

Dean finds that comforting.

 

“Fetch Custer and saddle him, Sam.  You’re going to town,” Dean says, walking past his brother and toward Lucas, indicating the other boy should follow him out of the barn.

 

Dean leans on a paddock fencepost, the comforting snuffle of Custer trying to reach the last dusty bit of grass under the bottom rail keeping him company while he waits.

 

Lucas takes his time, but eventually he emerges, blinking, into the odd half-light of the mid-morning, the cloud cover still low and heavy, muffling their words, tamping them down somehow.

 

“You’re sending for the sheriff,” Lucas says when he reaches Dean, stopping in front of him and settling easily on his heels, though in his eyes a wary light tells Dean the boy isn’t as relaxed as he’s trying to appear.

 

“He came out here looking for you first thing,” Dean answers mildly, like he’s making an observation about the weather.  Like the boy’s accounting for his whereabouts is the last thing on Dean’s mind.

 

Lucas shrugs elegantly.  “I’m popular,” something opulent in the vowels reminding Dean how foreign Lucas is to him.  To them.

 

“Where were you, Lucas?  We know you went into the barn about three o’clock this morning.  Did you just keep going, right out the back, right into town?  Did you visit the Cornants?  Maybe court their daughter?”  
  


“Court?”  Lucas tilts his head, making out that he doesn’t understand the word.  “Does that mean…making the love to?”  
  


Dean straightens away from the post, crosses his arms and levels a hard look on the boy.  “You think it’s funny that a poor, innocent girl was ruined last night by a perverse monster?  Do you think making a joke out of it is going to work when the girl’s father comes out here to hang you from the nearest oak?”

 

An oily smile crosses Lucas’ mouth, and he chases it with his tongue, but it’s not a nervous gesture.

  
It’s appetite.

 

All at once the breath is frozen in Dean’s mouth.  His throat tightens, his stomach seizes, and he thinks for a choked moment that he’s going to vomit.  When he recovers breath enough to speak, it’s with his Savior’s words to Legion:

 

“What is your name?”

 

Lucas hesitates—confusion or calculation, it’s unclear.

 

“What is your name, demon?” Dean asks again, and this time the boy laughs. 

“Demon?” he echoes, delight apparent in his tone.  “Demon?” he repeats, laughing harder.

 

“I am only a boy.  There is a wolf here, yes, but I am not the wolf.”

 

Without another word, Lucas turns on his heel and walks back to the barn, eating the ground up with the gliding steps so eerie and so like him.

 

Dean shivers out the last of the cold that had paralyzed him in place and tries to shake free of the sense that he’s just come face to face with a power far beyond his own feeble faith.

 

Telling himself he needs more rest, that Grandfather’s wandering mind is starting to get to him, too, Dean moves into the yard far enough to see into the barn and say, “Sam?”

 

Sam glances up from where he’s tightening Custer’s cinch.  His eyes track from Lucas, who’s stalking past him toward the ladder, back to Dean, a question in them.

 

Dean shakes his head and gestures with his hand for Sam to lead the horse out.

 

“Go right to town,” Dean instructs as Sam mounts.  “Don’t stop for anyone except the sheriff.  Don’t talk to anyone, and if you must, be polite and tell them nothing.  You hear me?”  
  


Sam ducks his head in a nervous nod and tries on a smile.  “I’ll be fine, Dean.  Back before you know it,” he assures, clucking to get Custer moving.  “Don’t worry,” he adds they break into a jog. 

 

Dean feels like he isn’t capable of anything else anymore.

 

He heads into the house to check on Grandfather and finds the old man has fallen out of bed.  The whites of his eyes flutter feebly under his half-opened lids as Dean lifts him, shocked at how light his Pawpa feels and disturbed at the way his bones shift loosely under his skin, like they’re barely being held together.

 

His Grandfather doesn’t stir as Dean tucks him back under the covers—dry, at least for now—and Dean sits down heavily, dropping his head into his hands as he prays.  He wants to pray for his grandfather’s healing, but he feels like it’s disingenuous.  He knows the old man’s time is near, knows that his Pawpa wouldn’t want to live like this:  weak and wetting the bed, unable to do for himself.

 

Still, a selfish part of Dean wants his Pawpa to hang on, to stay with him.

 

“Don’t leave me just yet, Pawpa,” he whispers to the only father he’s ever really known.  “I’m going to build you a church.”

 

It seems like an empty promise, but he hopes his grandfather can hear him and will find hope in it.  Dean means to do it if there’s any way at all.

 

Dean doesn’t know how long he sits with Grandfather, sometimes reading him aloud his favorite passages of Isaiah and Luke and Ephesians.  It’s not until he hears boot-heels on the porch that he realizes some time must have passed.

 

He leaves his grandfather with a last, searching glance, just to see that the old man’s chest still rises and falls, and walks out to the kitchen to find Sam at the sink, dabbing his face with a towel.  When his brother turns toward him, Dean sees that Sam’s nose and lip are bloodied, dried blood down his shirtfront, dust in his hair and coating his shirt and pants.

  
“What happened?”

 

“Later,” Sam says shortly, jerking his chin toward the door.  “The Sheriff’s out there with Lucas.”

 

“He’ll keep,” Dean answers, just as terse, stalking across the narrow space between them to take the towel from Sam’s hand and examine his brother’s injuries.

  
“What happened?” he asks more gently as he gets another towel, pumps water over it, and clears the worst of the filth and blood from his brother’s abused face.

 

“Some kids were out in front of McMurty’s,” Sam answers, naming the only dining establishment in town.  This part of Kansas is dry, so at least they don’t have to worry about drunks lounging around in front of a saloon.  “They stopped me, wanted to know where I was going.  One of ‘em grabbed Custer’s bridle.  I wanted to whip them with the reins, but I remembered what you told me.”

 

Sam stops there, his breath hitching.  Dean cups his brother’s cheek to keep his head still as he looks at the gash at the corner of Sam’s lip.  It’s not too deep, but he knows it must sting.  Sam’s nose is swollen, too, but after gingerly running his fingers over it, Dean doesn’t think it’s broken.

 

“What then, Sam?” 

 

Dean turns his brother by the shoulders and makes him sit at the kitchen table.  He hands him the towel in case his nose starts up again, and goes about the process of making them some coffee.  It’s a strange thing to do—they aren’t in the habit of afternoon tea in these parts—but Sam seems shaken, and Dean’s tired.  They could both do with a little break.

 

Besides, Dean imagines he’s going to need the fortification of strong coffee when the sheriff gets done with Lucas.

 

With the scent of coffee brewing comfort in the air, Dean moves up behind his brother’s chair and brackets Sam’s strong shoulders with his hands, rubbing soothing circles until Sam relaxes with a moan against the ladder-back and lets his head fall forward. 

 

Voice muffled by the angle of his neck, Sam tells Dean the rest.  The way one of the boys, John O’Hooran, pulled him from the saddle.  The way Custer shied and tossed his head and crow-kicked.  The way another young man, Avery Camberford, pulled him up by the collar and called him a devil and struck him across the mouth and threw him back into the dirt. 

 

The way they all ganged upon him then, five or six, kicked and scuffing dirt into his face, until Sheriff Grady himself had come out of his office two doors down to see what the ruckus was about and broke up the scuffle, helping Sam to his feet and handing him Custer’s reins.

 

“They laughed at me, called me a freak,” Sam says, so softly Dean has to strain forward to hear.

 

Dean can’t resist running his thumbs over the nape of Sam’s neck, then, feeling the fragility of those narrow bones, the trust Sam has in Dean when he wraps his hands around Sam’s throat, not squeezing, just holding.

Sam breathes out, “Dean,” and Dean tightens his fingers, feeling Sam’s frantic pulse rabbiting against his left palm.

 

At last, Dean releases Sam, who surges up from his seat and kneels on it, grabbing at Dean’s shoulders and pulling him close, the hard back of the chair preventing them from touching anywhere else except where Sam’s lips touch Dean’s, his tongue making its wet way into Dean’s mouth with a needy sound, Dean’s hands moving of their own volition to bracket Sam’s slim hips.

 

They break away, dazed and panting, and Dean’s about to forget himself entirely when a boot-heel on the porch step warns him that it’s broad daylight and they have a guest.

 

He’s smoothing a hand over his face as if to hide all traces of the kiss when Sheriff Grady raps on the wooden frame of the screen door.

 

Dean goes out to meet him rather than letting him inside.  Sam says behind Dean, “I’ll check on Grandfather,” and Dean’s relieved.  He doesn’t want his little brother suffering the sheriff’s further scrutiny.

 

“Thanks for what you did in town,” Dean says without preamble.

  
Bud Grady nods, short and sharp, eyes tracking away from Dean’s face toward the barn.

“He tell you what you wanted to know?” Dean asks.  He has no idea himself what the boy might have said, half hopes he got smart and Grady had to smack him around.

 

Once upon a time, he’d have been ashamed of the thought.  Now, it just makes him bite the inside of his cheek to keep from grinning.

 

Grady doesn’t answer Dean’s question, just says, “Keep him around the farm, Dean, for God’s sake.  Folks in town are crazy with fear over what’s been happening to these girls.  They don’t trust strangers—you know that.  Just…keep him here.  I can’t be responsible for what might happen to him if that boy falls into the wrong hands.”

 

Dean nods, squints over the sheriff’s shoulder into the middle distance.

 

“Keep Sam close, too, Dean.”

 

This brings Dean’s eyes to Grady’s.

 

“What are you saying, Bud?  You think my brother had something to do with this?”

 

Bud has the decency to look ashamed, but it’s gone in a flash, and when he squares his shoulders and his jaw, Dean knows he’s come to the end of the sheriff’s good graces.

 

“Sam’s always been a little different, Dean.  Times like these, different is dangerous.  Just do as I say, alright?”

 

“Yessir,” Dean answers, but his voice is low and hard, and Bud doesn’t look at him as he sketches a wave in the air and walks off the porch to untie his horse from the paddock fence rail, mount up, and leave.

 

He pauses in the drive near the porch, though, to say, “Keep ‘em close, Dean,” and then he’s gone at a jog, dust like a veil dragging behind him.

 

Dean’s watching him ride away when he notices a second dust cloud intersecting the first and soon makes out a buckboard with two people in it heading up the lane toward the house.

 

He’s in the drive to take Sarah Gudmundson’s hand and help her climb down from the buckboard, following suit with Delilah Willard, her passenger.

  
“We’ve come to keep vigil,” Sarah says in the short, clipped accent of her ice-eyed people. 

 

“You’re welcome here,” Dean says sincerely.  “Thank you.  Sam’s with Grandfather now.  Through the kitchen and down the hall to the back.  I’ll put your horse out in the paddock and give him some hay.”

 

Sarah nods and heads off in her brisk, long-legged stride. Delilah lingers, smiling at Dean, until Dean says, “Thank you for coming, Ms. Willard.”

 

She scoffs then, kicking a primly booted toe in the dust of the drive.  “No thanks necessary, Mr. Winchester.  We all love your Grandfather.”

 

There’s something sly in the way she says it, but Dean can’t figure out how that is, so he tips his hat and moves to disengage the brake on the buckboard.  “You can go right on through,” he repeats, unsure what else he should say.

 

Delilah goes with a flounce that Dean ignores, busy as he is leading the horse forward to the paddock rail to unhitch him.

 

That done, Dean lets him out into the paddock and throws a forkful of hay out for him, checks to see that the trough water is free of scum, too.  Necessary tasks completed, Dean pauses by the paddock fence, suddenly uncertain and feeling out of place.  He has no desire to re-enter the house, to expose himself to the murmur of women at vigil; he wants only work, something simple and hard to take his mind off the worries of the hour and day.

 

Sam solves the problem for him by coming from the house at a quick walk, his backward-looking eyes and the nervous white at the corners indicating that the women have driven him out.

 

“Too much for you?” Dean asks, a surprisingly lightness back behind the words.

  
Sam smiles sheepishly and ducks his head.  “They wanted me to pray with them,” he answers by way of explanation.

  
Dean only nods, not having to imagine Sam’s discomfort, and claps his brother on the shoulder.

 

“Help me sharpen the plow and check the traces?” he offers, and Sam’s smile grows wide and relieved.

 

The work takes them the better part of the day, and it’s mostly restful, though there are moments when Dean cannot draw his eyes away from Sam’s hands, slick with oil, working it into the tired leather of the plow lines, or Sam’s tongue, its pink tip peeking out from his teeth as he works at the loosening a buckle.

 

Sam leaves his side only long enough to climb the ladder to the loft and spy on Lucas, who’s sleeping, according to Sam when he returns to Dean.  “He cleaned up, too.”

 

Dean shrugs off the momentary unease the news brings, not wanting to ruin a good afternoon by thinking of the boy who’s brought so much trouble to them both.

 

They finish as the afternoon sun is drawing long, hard lines on the drive and are washing at the pump when Delilah calls, “You!”

 

Together, they head for the porch, where the girl stands with a towel in her hands, drying them. 

 

“Supper’s on.”

 

The kitchen is redolent with beef and baked potatoes, and Dean’s discovers his appetite when it pokes him hard in the belly.  They sit down, offering their thanks first to Mrs. Gudmundson and Delilah before saying grace over the meal.  The women eat quickly and in shifts, one and then the other, and Dean’s grateful that Sam says nothing while it’s just the two of them with Delilah at the table.

 

Delilah, for a rare change, seems solemn, uninterested in flirting with Dean, and he’s grateful for that, too.

 

His gratitude is short-lived.

 

“May I speak with you alone, Brother Dean?” Delilah asks as she rises from the table to clear their plates.

 

Dean glances at Sam, sees his brother’s face tighten, but Dean can hardly object to her request.  Thinking fast, he answers, “Of course, Sister Willard,” emphasizing the formality of their respective roles in the dialogue to come.  “I often pray in the side yard after meals,” he continues, and she nods, understanding his implicit invitation.

 

Dean figures it’s the best way to appease Sam, whose eyes have grown dark, lips tight with displeasure.  The praying tree is in full view of the window in Grandfather’s room.  Delilah is hardly likely to attempt familiarities with Sarah Gudmundson just inside.

 

Of course, Dean underestimates the girl’s focus.

 

Dean’s careful to keep her honest, standing opposite her with a wide, old oak root between them for a buffer.  She stares up at him earnestly, and he thinks for a minute or two that he’s safe.

 

“I’m so sorry for my father’s behavior, Brother Dean.  What he’s done to you and your family is shameful, and I want you to know that I have no part in it, me nor my sister, neither.”

 

Dean puts on his professional smile, the one he wears when a parishioner confides in him some pedestrian sin.

 

“You’ve no cause to feel guilty, Sister Willard,” he assures her.  “You’ve no part in the sins of your father.”

  
“But doesn’t the bible tell us that those sins will be visited on the children of the sinner?”  For all the world, Delilah sounds like she sincerely wants to know, though before this moment she’d never indicated even a slight interest in bible study.

Dean answers her with a vague hope that perhaps she can be his first genuine conversion and then squelches the prideful feeling the thought brings.  Grandfather isn’t even dead yet; the church doesn’t belong to Dean.

 

“That’s the old testament, Delilah,” Dean explains.  “But Christ came to free us of the sins of our fathers and give us the choice to live according to His will.  If you are free of blame in this, you are free of sin, and even had you sinned, you can be washed clean of it by your faith and by your works.”

 

“My works?” Delilah asks, sounding confused and taking a step toward him.  It puts her atop the root that had protruded between them, brings her almost to eye level with Dean.

 

Distracted by the opportunity to preach to a willing congregation of one, though, Dean goes on, “If you’re ashamed of your father’s sin and want no part in it, you can always do something to turn away from his behavior.”  He has to be cautious here, treading as he is on the line between doing what’s right and honoring one’s larcenous father.  The commandments never were negotiable, he knows.

 

“Would this do it?” she asks, swaying on her perch, the precarious motion causing her to fall forward.  Dean catches her automatically, hands going to her waist, and before he’s aware of her intention, Delilah has planted her lips on his own.

  
Her mouth is supple and full, her tongue wicked and lithe, and when he opens his mouth in surprised protest, she slips it into his mouth.

 

Alarmed now at the vigor of her seduction, Dean tries to push her back onto the root, but her weight is uncooperative, levered as it is against him, and short of lifting her bodily, he cannot move her away.  Panicking a little at the thought of being caught like this, Dean tries to disengage himself by stepping backwards, but there’s a root there, as well, and with visions of tripping and having the girl in his arms end up sprawled atop him, he’s still making mental plans when he hears, “Dean!” from the yard.

 

Dean does break away then, stumbling, spreading his arms wide in an effort to keep from falling backwards and landing in an undignified heap.

  
For her part, if Delilah is embarrassed by the compromising position in which they were just caught, she makes no indication.  On the contrary, the cat-like smile she casts Sam as she sashays past him is enough to suggest that she’ll be picking canary feathers from her teeth for days.

 

Belatedly, Sam says, “Mrs. Gudmundson is getting ready to leave,” to explain his intrusion on the intimacy, and Dean nods dumbly, feeling guilty, though he knows he wasn’t the one to blame for this little scene.

 

By the way Sam turns on his heel and stalks off, Dean knows he’s going to have to find something to say.  Every line of Sam’s retreating back radiates anger and hurt.

 

Dean busies himself then with catching Mrs. Gudmunson’s horse and harnessing it, leading horse and buckboard into the drive near the porch for the women, who are leaving the house, Sam trailing mutely behind them, thunder still hanging about his face.

 

Thanking the women, Dean helps them both into the buckboard, and Mrs. Gudmundson gathers the reins in confident hands, saying, “The Mayhews will be here in the morning to sit with your Grandfather so that you can lead the service.”

Another round of thanks and a few polite, empty words, some of them from the still self-satisfied Delilah, and the buckboard is gone, disappearing into the dusk with a clatter.

 

Dean hesitates on the porch, not wanting to go inside, preferring the relative open of this space to the confines of the kitchen, where he can just make out Sam sitting in the growing gloom, back to the door.

 

Finally conceding that Sam isn’t going to budge, Dean pulls open the screen door, which makes its usual teeth-jarring protest. 

  
“It’s not what you think,” he says to Sam’s rigid back.  “She threw herself at me, Sam.  Literally.  I didn’t ask for that, and I certainly didn’t start it.”

 

Still nothing.  Sam could be stone for all the response Dean is getting.

 

“Sam,” he says, almost a whisper, almost pleading.  He brushes the tips of his fingers over Sam’s nape, and Sam explodes up from the chair, knocking it backward toward Dean, who moves to catch it only to be shoved aside, into the open kitchen storm door, which slams back against the wall.

  
The glass in the window shatters, echoing the shot-like sound of the ladder-back chair hitting the wooden floor, and then Sam is pressing against Dean, heedless of the broken glass he’s grinding into dust under his boots, heedless of Dean’s struggle, his startled gasp caught in his throat as Sam’s mouth crushes his, hard, Dean’s teeth cutting into the soft tissue of his inner lip, pulling a pained noise from him.

 

Sam ignores it, keeps kissing him, a vicious press of lips that makes him hard so fast he grows dizzy with it—or with lack of breath, for Sam is relentless, forcing his tongue against Dean’s bleeding lip, driving his mouth open.

 

Sam plunges his tongue against Dean’s, thrusts it far back into Dean’s mouth until he almost gags from the invasion before relaxing, letting Sam have this, his revenge, letting him mark out the boundaries of this thing between them with the pressure of his bruising hands on Dean’s collarbones and the tearing shove of his mouth against Dean’s.

 

At last, Sam steps back, a smear of Dean’s blood on his lower lip, eyes wild and dark as they take in Dean’s state—the swollen lip, the crumpled collar, the bulge in his trousers, all evidence of Dean’s concession.

 

“The whore can’t have you, Dean,” Sam growls at last, staggering back as though the last of his avid energy has drained from him with those words.  He rights the chair he’d knocked over and sags into it. “You’re mine,” he finishes, eyes not meeting Dean’s.

  
He looks so young and lost that for a moment Dean forgets his state, only the discomfort of his swollen lip, his straining shaft against the metal of his zipper, bringing him back to the here and now.

 

“I don’t want her,” he soothes, crossing the small space between them to sink into the chair nearest Sam.  He reaches out a hand to touch Sam’s where it lays on the table, palm up, fingers curled, like he’s just let something precious get away.  “I want you,” Dean adds, waiting for Sam to look up at him.  “Only you.”

 

They haven’t shared a lot of words about what they’ve become, but Dean hopes that these, at least, will let Sam know all he needs to. 

 

By Sam’s little nod, Dean guesses it’s enough. 

 

As Dean gets the broom and dustpan to sweep up the broken glass, Sam talks.

 

“Delilah was sent here to seduce you, Dean.  I saw it in her heart.  Her father is afraid of what you might discover.  There’s more money than the one hundred he promised you on Monday.  There’s a lot more.  They’ve been taking money from the congregation for years, claiming that they were charged with collecting it to help fund a church building, but they never meant to give it to Grandfather.  How do you think they’ve afforded all those plots of land they’ve bought up over the years, or that big barn they’ve got now?  There’s plenty left where that all came from, though, and that’s what Jed Willard’s afraid of you finding out.  He was hoping if you dishonored his daughter, he could use that as leverage to keep you quiet or make a big scandal of it and cause you to get thrown out of the church altogether.  With Grandfather dead and you disgraced, he’d never need to cough up the money, maybe.  Or maybe he’d be pastor himself.  I don’t know.  All I know is you can’t trust Delilah.  She’s living up to her name, Dean.  She’ll betray you and leave you weak and wanting.”

 

He wants to believe Sam, believe the look in his eyes that says he’s trying to help Dean.  Believe that his brother is gifted, not a freak but a prodigy, proof that God can love them, even now, with what they’re becoming.

 

But Dean is skeptical, and Sam sees it, a cloud shuttering his hopeful gaze, and Sam rises from his chair to move away, muttering something about finding wood to cover the hole in the door as he exits the kitchen and disappears into the fullness of night.

 

Alone for a little while before duty presses him to go to Grandfather, Dean considers Sam’s words carefully, letting hope build that maybe there’s a way to give his Pawpa the church he’d always wanted.  Maybe he could say something during the service to bring out the Willards’ guilt, get them to confess, at least to him, about what they’d done.

 

Imagining the sermon he’s going to give startles Dean into remembering that he hasn’t got anything prepared, and that’s enough to have him seeking his grandfather’s side, retrieving the worn leather-covered bible from the nightstand and opening it, hoping for inspiration.

 

He doesn’t know how long he’s been reading Colossians to Pawpa when he hears the screen door slap shut and then the dull thud of the storm door being closed, but he pauses with a finger on the text and turns around to see Sam stopping in the doorway.

 

“You want some rest?” Sam asks, voice neutral, eyes not staying long on Dean’s.

 

“Sure,” Dean answers.  “I’m reading Colossians.”

 

Sam shrugs and takes the bible, letting the book fall closed as Dean removes his finger.  “I like the old testament better.  Maybe something about Lot and his daughters.”

 

Dean feels a zing of cold fear arc through him and he shoots Sam a quelling look.  Where does he get off saying things like that in front of their grandfather?

  
Of course, Pawpa is still and silent, only stentorian snores to indicate that he’s alive at all.

 

Sam smirks, a nasty little look, and Dean resists the urge to slap him.

Ashamed of the impulse, Dean escapes the room and climbs to his own, shucking off his boots and jacket, stripping to his shorts and undershirt, and climbing under the cold covers of his bed.  The linens are musty, reminding him that they need changing, and that thought leads to laundry leads to the myriad other chores he has to undertake after the service despite it being the Lord’s day.

 

Thinking of the service brings Dean back with some alarm to his unwritten sermon, so there’s not much in the way of rest for him, and when Sam appears a few hours later, Dean’s still awake, eyes stinging and bleary with sleeplessness, jaw muscles sore from the way he’s been clenching his teeth.

 

“You look like shit,” Sam says, and Dean answers, “Language,” automatically, but Sam only snorts dismissively and kicks off his boots, stripping with messy efficiency, discarded clothes scattered like chaff as he climbs under his own covers and sighs into sleep.

 

Dean tries not to be jealous of Sam’s easiness with it all.

 

He’s once again reading Paul’s advice to Christ’s disciples when he hears something outside, a muffled ruckus from the yard.  The wind is up again, as it often is in the darkest hours of pre-dawn, but it’s not the wind making that rhythmic thud—not the wind alone.

 

The stars are buried behind cloud, the moon already down, and dawn is only a faint grey promise to the east when Dean steps out onto the porch, taking care not to let the screen door slam with the hand not holding the shotgun.

 

One of the big front doors of the barn is open and swinging in the wind, striking the barn on every third or fourth gust.

 

Fighting the frantic push of the gale, Dean approaches the barn.  It’s black as pitch inside, and he didn’t bring a lantern—wouldn’t have done much good in the wild gusts, anyway.  He grabs the swinging door, brings it to behind him, securing it on the inside with a chain they have for just such conditions as tonight’s.

 

He can’t see a thing, but Dean knows the barn by heart, crosses to the ladder so quietly that even Custer, usually fretful in rough weather, doesn’t nicker or grumble.  Up the ladder, wondering what he thinks he’s going to see in the pitch, Dean steps onto the loft floor and creeps toward the pallet, feeling with his booted toes for any obstruction in his way.

 

Nothing.

 

He finds the lantern mostly by touch, locates matches on the upended crate Lucas uses for a nightstand, blinks against the sudden brightness in the warm, hay-sweet space.

  
The bed is empty, undisturbed.  There’s a pair of shoes beside the pallet, a pair of pants hung on a peg over it.  Nothing else to indicate the boy lives there at all.  No personal items, not even a shirt.

 

Dean wonders if this means the stranger has left them at last, and he lets himself feel relief at the thought, fantastic though it is.

 

And then the cold comes with fear on its heels.  If Lucas has left, maybe…

 

_Sam._

Dean blows out the lantern, leaves it on the nightstand where he found it, feels his way toward the ladder and down it, across the barn to the big door, releasing the chain, opening it with a firm hand to keep it from being torn free of his grip, closing it and barring it, since he knows the boy isn’t in there.

  
Dawn is a longer line of light to the east, but it still offers nothing for Dean, who crosses the familiar yard with haste, opens the kitchen doors with care, closes them against the uproar outdoors, and pauses in the still kitchen, hoping to hear Sam down the hall reading Isaiah to Grandfather.

 

Only snore-broken silence instead.

 

Up the stairs then, to the room, where he sees that Sam’s bed is empty and shudders out a desperate breath, fear building to doom in his throat, choking him.  He races back down the stairs, mindless of the racket he’s making now, skids to a stop as the kitchen door slowly opens and there’s Sam, staring at Dean with surprise on his face.

 

“Dean?”  
  


“Where were you?”  It sounds harsher than he means it, flooded with accusation brought about by worry and fear.

 

“Outhouse.  Delilah’s supper didn’t sit well with me.”  His little brother’s grimace of disgust is enough to convince Dean that Sam’s telling the truth, that and the greenness about his eyes evident in the light of the single lamp beside the sink. 

 

Sweaty and pale, Sam sits at the table, and Dean pumps him a cup of cold water from the sink.

 

Sam sips at it slowly, regaining his color, his hands shaking a little at first but steadying once he’s drunk his fill.

 

“You okay?”

 

Sam nods, closes his eyes, expression weary.

 

“How long were you out there?”

  
Sam shrugs.  “Twenty minutes, half hour.  Why?”

 

“Was the barn door swinging when you went?”

 

Another shrug.  “I didn’t notice.  I was in a hurry.” 

 

“You seen Lucas?”

 

Sam brings his eyes up fast to Dean’s face.  “Why?  Isn’t he out there?”

 

Dean shakes his head.

 

“I didn’t see him, Dean.  I don’t know where he is.”

 

There’s something of an effort in Sam’s words, enough that Dean wonders if Sam knows something he’s not saying.  Reviewing his brother’s face, though, Dean has to concede that Sam still looks sick.

  
“Go back to bed, Sam.  Get some rest.”  He touches Sam’s shoulder then and passes him, heading for Grandfather’s side again.

 

“Good night,” Sam’s soft voice calls, following him down the hallway.

 

Dean stops and turns, says, “Good night, Sam,” and then enters Grandfather’s room and opens to Colossians once more.

 

Full light brings the sound of a horse and buggy coming up the lane.  Dean greets Anna Mayhew and her middle daughter, Jane, who’ve come to keep vigil so that Dean can lead the Sunday morning service.

 

“That’s kind of you, ma’am,” Dean notes, helping them down and gesturing them inside with a nod.  “I’ll just untack her, and—“

 

“No, no,” Mrs. Mayhew interrupts.  “You take her.  She’s not spry, but she’ll get you there in time, and there’s no sense you doing the extra work of tacking up your own.”

 

“Thank you, Mrs. Mayhew,” Dean says, unaccountably touched by her kindness.

 

“It’s no trouble, Mr. Winchester,” she answers, and Dean feels the pride singing a little in his veins.  She’s called him Dean since he was knee-high to a grasshopper, but today he’s Mr. Winchester.

 

Sam’s in the kitchen making coffee when Dean follows the Mayhews inside.  He shows them back to Grandfather’s room.  The old man is still asleep, though quieter now, the wrinkled-paper skin of his face and hands stark in the morning light.

 

“Would you like some breakfast, ma’am?”

 

“No, sir, don’t you bother yourself.  We ate before we came.  We’ll just sit with your Grandfather until you’re off, and if he stirs, maybe we’ll change his linens.”

 

Dean follows her hesitant eyes to the yellowed pillow case, grease from his Pawpa’s hair making the thin cotton almost transparent.

 

“I’ll just bring those for you, then.”  He does as he says, leaving the last of the clean sheets on the dresser, and nods to his grandfather’s bible on the nightstand.  “He likes to hear the new testament.”

 

“Perhaps Jane will read to him, then, when he wakes up.  She’s got a lovely voice.”

 

Jane blushes furiously and ducks her head.

 

“I’ve often thought so,” Dean says, smiling at the girl, who trembles with Dean’s praise.  It’s not an empty compliment; Dean’s admired her beautiful singing on Sundays.

 

Duty to his grandfather done, Dean hurries to get himself dressed for services and to take a last look at the scribbled notes for a sermon he never got around to writing in full.  He’s surely heard his grandfather’s wisdom often enough to be able to pull something together.

Preoccupied with his thoughts and worried about what might happen with the Willards, Dean almost walks into Sam, who’s standing by the table with a plate of eggs and toast in his hand.

 

“Eat something,” Sam says.  “I’ll go clean up.”  
  
Surprised, Dean blurts, “You’re coming with me?”

 

Sam’s only answer is to set the plate down a little harder than is strictly necessary.  Then he’s gone up the stairs to their room.

 

Dean’s rinsing his plate at the sink when Sam clatters back down the stairs in what passes for his Sunday best.  The pants are a bit dusty at the cuffs, the jacket unpressed, the collar of his shirt unwashed and limp, but he looks respectable enough.  Half the congregation doesn’t own jackets or dress trousers, after all.  They’re simple folk in these parts and don’t appreciate people who put it on.

 

Nervous, Dean’s not sure if he wants to hurry to get to the tent to greet the first arrivals or take his time so that he can go over his chosen scripture passages one last time.  Sam decides for them by offering to drive.

 

“You look a little pale,” is all Sam says by way of explanation, but Dean is grateful for his brother’s presence and holds back his habitual denial.  His fingers have left damp smudges on the worn leather of his father’s bible, the one Dean always brings to services.

 

The ride seems to take much longer than usual, and by the time they arrive at the empty field, Dean’s nerves have been overcome by his impatience to get started.  Unfortunately, they’re early, and no one else has arrived.

 

After checking the tent tie-downs, tying back the flaps, and dusting off the wooden chairs under the peaked canvas, Dean approaches the simple wooden lectern that is the only furniture on the raised platform at the front of the space. 

 

He puts his bible there, opens it, but his eyes lose focus almost at once, blurring the words, as he considers that he’s about to preach to a congregation all on his own for the first time in his life.  Sure, Dean’s witnessed before, plenty of times.  But he’s never had the sermon to himself, never delivered the words of Christ to an audience eager for the saving Word.

 

Dean only hopes he can do justice to that Word.

 

Sam calls from the opening in the tent, “They’re coming,” and Dean leaves the bible, marker in place, to greet these people he’s known for most of his life.

 

He wonders if everyone will come, if they’ll stay for the whole service or if it’s only curiosity that brings them here at all.

 

When the late stragglers have arrived, Dean looks out at a mostly-full tent.  He sees a few faces familiar only from his work at Bradley’s.  Gawkers, he figures, come to see the newest show.

 

Well, if it’s a show they want…

 

Dean chose the day’s text—Matthew, Chapter Six—for many reasons, not the least of which is the Savior’s pointed advice about keeping what’s yours and not taking from others.  But besides the obvious application of Christ’s words, there’s something else he’s always liked about it.

 

“’The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!’ our Lord says.  Now, I know this can seem a little confusing, the way Jesus seems to be talking in riddles.  Our Savior never spoke a word but it had purpose, though, and in this case, it’s to show us how important our eyes are to the way we look at things.

 

See, we have a habit of judging people by how they look and making assumptions based on their appearances.  Our eyes show us the way things are, and we tend to believe them.  But the thing is, the eye is a part of us, and we’re sinners.  We look at the world through our sins, like we’re wearing spectacles.  Those spectacles show us only what we want to see, and sometimes—maybe often—we overlook what’s actually there. 

 

Worse, we act on what we think—or perceive, if you follow me—and not on what’s actually true.  That’s what Jesus is talking about here.

 

If we look at the world through goodness, if we put away the spectacles of sin, well, then, the world is a beautiful place, full of light and hope and love for each other.

  
But if we look at the world through that sin-stained glass.  Well…it’s not much of a world, is it?  What do we see through sin but more sin?

 

So I say to you, brothers and sisters, put away the sin.  Take off the spectacles that keep you from seeing the Lord’s great love in all His works.  Look at the world around you with goodness.  See His light shining in every face.  See His love making everything beautiful. 

 

It’s all in how you look at things, my friends.  And I say:  Look rightly.”

 

A chorus of _Amens_ and a few heartfelt _Hallelujahs_ follow Dean’s last word, and as he looks out at the faces of his congregation, he sees approval there and hope—light and love, the Lord’s way, shining in each and every one of them.

  
Overcome all at once by a certainty that seems to come from outside of himself, caught up in the fervor of the moment, Dean says, “Look, too, at this humble canvas shelter that has been the home of our church for so long.  Soon, we’ll be breaking ground in this very spot for the church my grandfather longed for all the days of his service to the people of Sweetbranch in the name of the Lord.  Yes, my brothers and sisters, we at last have enough to answers Christ’s call, who said, ‘Build me a church!’”

 

Over the astonished cries of delight, Dean begins to sing _A Mighty Fortress is Our God_ and soon the stronger voices of the women in his congregation are swelling over the continuing murmur of surprise and speculation that marks Dean’s revelation to his people.

  
 _His people_.

 

As the last words of the song are sung, Dean closes his bible and comes down from the platform, processing down the central aisle and out the drawn-back flaps to wait in the yard for the inevitable questions.

Sam, who was closest to the rear, is first in front of Dean.

  
His, “Dean,” is low and cautionary, but Dean is distracted from answering his brother by Jed Willard, who is shouldering his way past the spinster Jarvis sisters.

 

“What in hell do you think you’re doing, boy?” Willard hisses. 

 

Dean smiles at the man and then turns to greet the Jarvises, effectively cutting off whatever Willard might have said next.

 

Caught up in the pleasure and curiosity of his congregation, Dean loses sight of Willard, but he sees Delilah saunter past, eyes wide and teasing on Dean’s own, before he’s drawn back into a discussion of the relative merits of oak versus pine and the paucity of building nails in Sweetbranch.

 

“We’ll have to send to KC for ‘em,” Leroy Able suggests.

 

“Maybe Remus could have ‘em made,” Jethro Bibbs offers.

 

“Naw, I think your best bet’s to send back East.  I hear tell they’ve got whole factries that make nothin’ but nails up Chicago way.”

 

And so it goes, long enough that Dean is starting to grow weary of the excitement, wishing only to get back home and see Grandfather, hoping the old man is awake and aware enough to hear about Dean’s sermon and the church.

 

Of course, there’s one thing standing between Dean and his wish.

 

Jed Willard is planted, feet apart, arms akimbo, in front of Dean’s buckboard.  Sam, Dean sees, is off to one side of the tent, head bent close to Delilah’s, cheeks flushed red.  He hesitates for a second, wondering if he should go pull Sam away from her—it’s clear his brother’s angry with the girl.  Clear from the set of Sam’s jaw and Delilah’s trembling lower lip.

 

But Jed decides that for Dean, saying, “You have some explaining to do, boy.”

 

Dean doesn’t like the tone at all, so instead of answering immediately, he plants his heels and squints skyward, as if assessing the progress of the sun is the most pressing matter he’s got to consider.

 

A sound from Jed brings Dean’s eyes back to the other man’s face.  It’s red with suppressed anger, and Dean can see a vein jumping at the corner of Jed’s left eye.

 

“Way I see it,” Dean begins, “I don’t owe you anything at all.  It’s you who owe me and mine.  You’ve been stealing money in the name of the Sweetbranch Irregular Baptist Church for going on ten years now—“  Actually, the time span’s a guess, but by the way the other man blanches and ticks his gaze left and right, anywhere but at Dean himself, Dean figures he was right.

 

“I wonder what these good people would think,” Dean continues, eyes deliberately tracking the last of the buckboards and saddle horses turning the mid-morning horizon dusty as they head back toward town.  “If they knew that Brother Willard had been robbing them blind all this time.”

 

“Now wait just a minute!  Who do you think you are talking to me like—“

“I think I’m the man who stands between you and perdition, Brother Willard.” The menace then in Dean’s voice is unmistakable, a righteous fire of the Lord mixed with the hard practicality of a man born and raised on the Plains.  “You have two choices.  Fall to the fire, or give us what’s ours.”

 

Willard blusters it out, makes excuses about taxes and land rights and all kinds of other codswallop, but in the end, he gracelessly concedes.

 

“You think that freak of a brother of yours is gonna help you build a house of the Lord?  You think anyone’s goin’ to help when they learn what you’ve been doin’ out to your place?”

 

Willard’s angry, desperate, lashing out with whatever comes to hand, but Dean feels a trickle of ice slide down his spine at the other man’s words.  He tells himself not to take the bait, to let it go.  Tells himself victory is his and the rest is just bitterness and spleen on the other man’s part.

 

“You, Delilah!  Come away from there,” Willard shouts, waving a hand to his daughter to move away from Sam.  “People don’t know what’s good for ‘em, but you’ll find out,” the man mutters as he starts to turn away.

 

“That a threat, Brother Willard?  Do I need to see Bud Grady about this?”

 

Willard’s look is pure venom when he spins back around to level it on Dean.  “You’ll get yer money, by God, and I hope it chokes ya.  You ‘n your kind… You think ‘cause I wasn’t born ‘n raised hereabouts I don’t know what you’re all about?  I’ve heard the stories, same as the others.  Judgment’s comin’ for you, boy.  Hell’s comin’ with it.”

 

Dean’s got half a mind to correct the man’s scripture but thinks better of it when he catches sight of Delilah’s face close up.  Four red marks the length of long, hard fingers stand out in livid contrast to the paleness of her tear-streaked cheek.

 

He expects Willard to protest, to put up a fuss about Sam striking the girl, but he doesn’t.  His eyes go hard and cold in his face when he takes in his daughter and then once more stop to pin Dean to the spot.  “Hell’s comin’,” he repeats, turning his daughter toward the buckboard where his wife and older girl already wait.

 

Sam joins him as the Willards are driving away.

 

“He promise you the money?” Sam asks quietly.  There’s an emptiness in his voice that suggests suppressed feeling. 

 

“Yes,” Dean answers curtly, adding nothing.

 

“I’m sorry,” Sam says then, real contrition in his voice.  “She said something about you, and I—“

 

“You shouldn’t have hit her, Sam.  There’s no reason on earth to strike a woman.  God gave Adam dominion over Eve and made him responsible for protecting her.”

 

“Spare me the bible talk, Dean.  I’m not one of your faithful followers.”  Contempt has driven contrition right out of the air.

 

“Well if you’re not afraid of God, maybe you should be afraid of Jed Willard,” he answers at last, moving toward the tent to retrieve his bible, straighten the chairs, and close up the flaps.

 

Sam’s scoffing sound carries the distance.

 

“Pride goeth,” Dean mutters, finishing his chores with the ease of long familiarity. 

 

Sam drives them back to the farm without a word.

 

Mrs. Mayhew is waiting on the porch as they pull up, and Dean’s heart leaps to his throat, sticking there for a long moment so that he’s delayed from asking.

 

As if sensing his fear, Mrs. Mayhew smiles and shakes her head.  “No, he’s still with us,” she assures. 

 

Without being asked, Sam says, “I’ll take care of your horse, Ma’am,” as Dean climbs down, finally finding his voice.

  
“What’s happened?”

 

“He’s slipped into a strange state,” she explains, leading Dean inside.  “He awoke for a few minutes, long enough for Jane to give him a little thin oatmeal, and then all of a sudden, he sat up straight, said a few words, and just fell back with his eyes half-open, still moving under the lids like he was looking at us, except we couldn’t rouse him again.  I wanted to send for the doctor, but we didn’t have our buggy, and I didn’t know if your horse could—“

 

“You did fine, Mrs. Mayhew.  Doc Jennings was here on Friday, and he said Grandfather might be like this for some time.  There’s nothing we can do now except pray for a peaceful end, I’m afraid.”

 

He’s surprised to hear himself talking like a minister comforting a member of his flock.  Maybe it’s that he’s already grown used to the idea of Pawpa passing, or maybe Dean doesn’t want Mrs. Mayhew to know how much it’s affecting him.

 

Or maybe he’s playing the role of Reverend Winchester a little too well, a tiny, nagging voice suggests.  Dean shoves the thought away.

 

“I’d like to sit with him for awhile, if you don’t mind, and I’m sure you and Jane would like to be getting home…”

 

“Nonsense, Mr. Winchester.  Jane and I are here for the day, if you don’t mind the company.  We’d be honored to keep vigil with you.”

 

And then he does feel it, sorrow like a growth in his throat, making it painful to swallow.

  
“That’s mighty kind of you, ma’am,” Dean manages, voice hoarse.  He clears his throat.  “I’ll just sit with him, then, and read to him a little.”

 

“Jane and I’ll see about some supper,” Mrs. Mayhew answers, as if it’s the most natural thing for her to take over their kitchen.  Dean supposes it is.  Sometimes he envies women the company of others like them, the comfort they seem to offer one another without any pretense or disguises.

 

Shaking off the pall of self-pity, Dean strides to Grandfather’s room, pausing in the door long enough to hear Jane finishing the last verse of “In a Rough Manger.”  She really does have an angelic voice, high and sweet and clear.

 

“Thank you, Jane,” he says quietly as the girl rises from her chair and turns to him.  “I’ll sit with him for awhile now.  Your mama is making supper in the kitchen.”

 

Jane curtseys shyly and slides past him with a blush.

 

Dean takes her seat and opens his bible to the Epistles.  “How about Philippians today, Pawpa?” Dean asks, taking in his Grandfather’s strange stare, the jaundiced yellow of his eyes visible beneath the half-shuttered lids. 

 

They’ve come to Paul’s advice concerning generosity when Dean senses a presence at the door.  Pausing, he turns his head just enough to see that it’s Sam standing there, hesitant, eyes wide and fixed on Grandfather’s still form.

 

“It’s alright,” Dean says, closing the bible around his place-holding finger and gesturing with the other hand.  “Come on.”

 

Sam shuffles into the room, nervous glance tracking from Dean to Grandfather and back again, fixing at last on Dean like he’s counting on his big brother to save him from some awful end.

 

“Pawpa, Sammy’s here,” Dean murmurs, leaving his hand out until he feels Sam’s fingers in his own and then tugging his brother to his side.  “Can you hear me, Pawpa?  It’s Sammy.  Samuel.  Can you give us some sign that you hear me?”

 

Nothing.

 

Beside him, Sam is rigid, his hand tight enough in Dean’s own that Dean feels his fingers start to tingle from his little brother’s grip.  Dean squeezes back to ease the hold, and Sam seems to realize at last what he’s doing.  He loosens his fingers but does not let go.

 

“Is he—?”  Sam starts, unable to finish.  Dean takes in his pallor and the way the vein in Sam’s neck pulses wildly.

 

“It might be today or tomorrow.  Might be some time still.  Doc Jennings couldn’t say for sure.  But soon, Sam.  Pawpa’ll be gone soon.”

 

Dean watches his brother’s face as Sam looks at their Grandfather.  For all the tension between them, all the times Sam talked back or deliberately baited their Grandfather, for all the insufferable, stubborn nonsense that went on between the two of them, Deans knows Sam loves their Grandfather.

 

“Good,” Sam says then, and Dean startles, his hand spasming in Sam’s.

 

“What?” Dean says, leaping from the chair, forgetting to be quiet, that this is a deathbed vigil.

 

“We can never have a life together if he’s with us, Dean,” Sam says, and the calculation in Sam’s voice, the reasonable observation so coldly delivered, makes Dean shiver.

 

“How dare you talk that way about him?” Dean whispers tightly through clenched teeth.  “He’s your grandfather, Samuel.  Do you really wish him dead?”

 

Sam is wearing a strange, twisted smile, one corner of his mouth rucked up and curled.  “I don’t wish it on him, no, but since he’s going, I wish it’d be soon.  That’s all I’m saying.  No sense in him lingering like this.  He wouldn’t have wanted it this way, either, you know.”

 

Sam’s right.  Dean knows it.  It doesn’t change the fact that Sam seems eager for the event.

 

“Go on out to the kitchen, see if Mrs. Mayhew needs any help.”

 

Sam shrugs and does as he’s told, and Dean, knees suddenly watery, sinks back into the chair he’d abandoned.

 

Dropping his head low, Dean closes his eyes and fixes on a prayer for strength, hoping he can make it through these next few days, keeping Sam safe and Grandfather comfortable.  Hoping he can get the money from Willard without a hitch and start to building the church his Pawpa always wanted.

 

A sharp pang of regret pierces Dean’s chest, tightens his breath.  If Grandfather dies without ever waking again, he’ll never know about Dean’s plans for a church, about the fact that Dean is going to build it for him. 

 

With a last, admittedly selfish prayer for his Grandfather to regain consciousness, Dean returns to the Epistles, moving on to _Colossians_.

 

He’s only gotten to Paul’s wisdom about what it means to be a servant of God’s church when Mrs. Mayhew appears at his shoulder and murmurs, “Supper’s on.  You go on now and eat.  Jane and I’ll sit with the Reverend awhile and take turns with you and your brother at the table.”

 

Lump of gratitude in his throat, happy to escape the stale air of his dying Pawpa’s little bedroom, Dean manages a tight, “Thank you,” and passes Jane in the doorway on his way to the kitchen.

 

Sam’s already at the table, hunk of brown bread in one hand, fork in the other, jaws working over the first of the meal.

 

Dean spears him with a look, and Sam swallows and puts down bread and fork.

 

He can’t gather his thoughts for grace, and for a long, tense minute, Dean just breathes.  Then he mutters a terse version of their Grandfather’s usual long prayer of gratitude.

 

Sam’s fork is scraping across the plate before Dean’s even opened his eyes after the “Amen.”

 

“You seen the boy?” Dean asks gruffly.

 

Sam nods and mumbles, “Yes,” around a mouthful of pork. 

 

Dean stops eating to stare at Sam, who gets his brother’s message a moment later and likewise stops.

 

“He was out there when I went to untack Mrs. Mayhew’s horse.  Said he was going to sleep.”

 

“Did he say where he’d been half the night?”  Dean’s not sure he wants an answer, really, wishes with vicious and sudden fury that the boy would just disappear, struck to ash by lightning or burned up in a blaze of righteous fire.

 

Sam shakes his head.  “Just walking, he said,” Sam answers, shrugging.

 

“Walking?  In the dark?  Where?”

 

Another shrug.  “Didn’t say.”

 

“And you aren’t the least bit curious where he gets to in the middle of the night?  You don’t find it at all suspicious?”

 

Sam freezes halfway through a third shrug when he catches the ugly look on Dean’s face.  Dean can feel the look he’s wearing, the unnatural curve of his lip, the sick power of black anger on his face.

 

“Dean, I don’t think he’s doing anything wrong, if that’s what you mean.”  Sam almost sounds scared, not a hint of his usual sullen defensiveness.  “He’s probably just out roaming because he doesn’t feel welcome here.”

 

And at last, Dean hears the sullen creeping back into Sam’s voice.  It’s almost a comfort.

 

“Well tell him to stay here from now on.  We’ve got too much trouble as it is without him bringing down more on us.”

 

“He isn’t doing anything wrong, Dean,” Sam insists, sounding like a child who’s failed to get his own way.

  
“You should know better than anyone, Sam, that whether or not you’re guilty means nothing to people in town.” 

 

It’s thoughtless of Dean, the way he throws Sam’s unpopularity at him.  He dredges up a history of hurt like it’s casual dinner conversation, and he’s sorry at once for it.  Sam only pushes his chair back, white line around his lips and tension in his shoulders indicating his hurt.

 

“Sam, I’m sorry.  Don’t—“

 

But Sam’s already slammed his plate into the sink and stormed to the screen door, wrenching it open hard enough that it squeals wildly on its hinges and stutters unevenly in the doorframe on the recoil.

 

“Damnit,” Dean swears under his breath.  Sam’s probably going to seek comfort from Lucas, the last thing Dean intended to have happen.  When did he become hostage on his own farm?

 

A shuffle of feet behind him alerts him to Jane’s presence.  The little girl is pale, eyes wide, mouth open.

  
“I’m sorry, Miss Jane,” Dean stammers, feeling ten kinds of foolish.  “I shouldn’t have spoken like that, much less in front of you.  I apologize.”

 

Jane nods her head convulsively, like her neck’s come spring-loaded, and Dean rises to put his plate in the sink, noting as he does that another piece of his grandmother’s china has been broken.  “I’ll…clean this up myself,” he adds, even more embarrassed at the evidence of their argument.

 

“It’s alright,” she whispers, face the picture of controlled fright.

 

“I’ll just go on in to sit with Grandfather so your mama can eat with you,” Dean says, taking the long way around the table to avoid coming too close to the spooked girl.

 

“I’m afraid I scared Jane,” Dean murmurs to Mrs. Mayhew.  “Sam and I were having a…difference of opinion, and she came in at a bad time.”

 

Mrs. Mayhew gives him a sympathetic look and pats his shoulder.  “Jane’s big brother, Matthew, is just like that.  One minute he’s the little boy I’ve always known and the next a complete stranger.  Angry?  I’ve never seen anything like it.  Don’t you worry, Mr. Winchester.  It’ll get better.  Leon tells me that all the time.”

 

Leon Varnes is Mrs. Mayhew’s brother, who came to live with them after Mr. Mayhew was killed in a lightning storm back in ’94.  How he has any expertise on raising a young boy, Dean doesn’t know, but it seems rude to ask, and he lets it go.

 

“Thank you, Mrs. Mayhew.  I do appreciate all the help you and Jane are giving.  It’s mighty generous of you.”

 

“It’s nothing ‘t all, Mr. Winchester.  You’d do the same for me and mine.”

 

She says it with such certainty that Dean believes her, forgetting for the time being the uneven history of the Winchesters in this part of the world.

 

Grandfather sleeps on in his half-staring state while Dean listens to the lulling murmur of female voices from the kitchen and then the familiar sounds of dishes being done—pump, suds, drain.  It soothes him until he’s almost asleep over the scriptures, finger skittering against the page, no longer following the words he’s supposed to be reading.

 

He’s startled to the point of nearly falling from his chair by the gravel-rough bark of his grandfather, who says, “The righteous shall throw down the wicked on the last day!”

 

“Pawpa?” Dean breathes, trying to swallow his heart back out of his throat.  His pulse races, electric arcs of surprise running through his veins as he tries to rein in his heartbeat.

 

“Pawpa, are you with me?”

 

Grandfather’s eyes are still half-closed, but in the space where once there was only the yellowed whites, Dean can make out the deep brown of his Pawpa’s irises.  He pushes off from the chair to kneel at his grandfather’s bedside and take the old man’s frail hand in his own.  He resists the urge to rub the paper-thin skin, irrationally fearful that the skin will peel away under his touch.

 

“Pawpa?”

 

“Dean?” the old man says, eyes opening a little wider.  “Where am I?”

“You’re in your bed at the farm, Pawpa,” Dean explains, squeezing the old man’s cold hand, trying not to shudder at the feel of bird-like bones grinding under his grip. “You’ve been asleep a long time, that’s all.  But you’re back now.”

 

Grandfather’s eyes narrow, native shrewdness divining from Dean’s features what he really meant to say.

 

“I’m walking in the valley of the shadow, Dean,” Pawpa says, his voice stronger than it’s been since last Sunday. 

 

“Nonsense, Pawpa.  You’re looking better already.”  He is, too.  There’s a healthy glow to his cheeks, and he’s got his eyes all the way open now.  His lips, always thin, are flush with blood, and his breathing is deep and easy.

 

“The Lord gives us all one last grace,” Grandfather answers, squeezing Dean’s hand and then shifting out from under it.

 

“Are you hungry?  There’s pork for supper.  Mrs. Mayhew makes a mean roast.”

 

Grandfather nods, and Dean feels a surge of real hope.

 

“I’ll get you a plate.”

 

He hurries to the kitchen, where he’s greeted by the strange sight of Sam crouched just inside the door talking seriously and in a whisper to Jane Mayhew.  Mrs. Mayhew is at the sink washing dishes, nothing in her posture suggesting one whit of alarm over this development.

 

Dean doesn’t interrupt, just goes to her side.  “Grandfather’s awake and hungry.  Would it be too much trouble to give him some supper?”

 

“Not at all,” Mrs. Mayhew answers, pleased surprise in her voice.  “Let me warm it for you, dear.  Janie, hand me that platter,” she continues, nodding at a cloth-wrapped dish obviously set aside for the cold house.

 

Sam rises from his crouch as his companion is called to work and gives Dean an inscrutable look over her head.  He takes another plate from the counter, this one obviously for Lucas, and turns away without sign or gesture.

 

Dean swallows a sigh, deciding that he’ll try talking to Sam after he’s given Grandfather some supper.

 

It doesn’t quite work out that way.

 

When Dean returns to Grandfather’s bedside only a few minutes later, the old man seems to be in a light doze.  Setting the warm plate down on the dresser, Dean moves to the bed and says, “Pawpa?” hoping to wake the old man without startling him.

 

Grandfather’s eyes fly open, take in Dean’s looming face, and he shouts, “Get thee behind me!”

 

“Grandfather,” Dean says, voice loud with surprise.  “It’s me.  It’s Dean.”

 

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” the old man avers, voice thundering in the close-shut room.

“Shh, now, hush.  It’s alright, Grandfather.  It’s me, Dean.  I’ve brought you some supper.”

 

If Dean’s words penetrate the old man’s wandering mind, he can’t tell.

 

“The valley of the shadow is dark and cold,” Grandfather says solemnly, looking at Dean like he expects a response.

 

“But you shall not fear, for he maketh you to lie down in green pastures,” Dean answers, hoping those are the right words to soothe him into pliancy.

 

They seem to do the trick.  Grandfather subsides with a huff against the pillows, and Dean moves forward again to help him sit up, propping the pillow against the headboard and lifting his Grandfather’s startlingly light frame so that he can eat without fear of choking.

 

Dean pulls the chair closer to the bed, snatches the hot pad and plate from the dresser, and sits down, offering some pork and potatoes on a fork for his Pawpa.

 

The old man’s disapproving gaze reminds Dean what he’s forgetting, and he sets the fork back down to bow his head while Pawpa works slowly through the longest version of their mealtime grace.

 

Despite that the food is only lukewarm by the time he gets it, Grandfather eats like a starving man, clearing the plate in record time, even with Dean feeding him.  Mrs. Mayhew puts in an appearance long enough to offer Dean a cup of cold water, which he gives to Grandfather, who drains it in one long draught. 

 

Meal finished and plates cleared by a silent, doe-eyed Jane Mayhew, Grandfather settles deeper into his pillow.

 

“Would you like me to read from _Ephesians_ , Pawpa?” Dean asks.

 

“Revelation,” the old man answers brusquely.

 

Dean has misgivings, given the nature of his Grandfather’s ramblings of late, but who is he to deny a dying man his scriptural comfort?

 

Dean opens to John of Patmos’ vision of the end times and begins to read.

 

The Whore of Babylon has just made her appearance when Mrs. Mayhew clears her throat delicately at the doorway.  Dean pauses and looks around at her.

  
“Jane and I have to be going, I’m afraid.  It’s getting on sunset, and we need to be home before dark.”

 

There’s a tightness at the corners of her eyes, a certain nervous tension around her mouth, and Dean realizes she’s afraid.

  
Afraid of whatever monster there is in the dark, preying on women in Sweetbranch.

 

Dean marks the page and says, “I’ll be right back, Grandfather,” rising from his place and leaving the bible there as if to keep the seat warm.

 

Out on the porch, Mrs. Mayhew is retying the strings of her bonnet.  Jane is scuffing her shoes in the dust of the drive as Sam leads their horse and buggy toward them.

 

“Thank you again, Mrs. Mayhew, Miss Jane.  Your kindness is a sign of the Lord’s grace, right enough.  You’re a blessing to us.”

 

Mrs. Mayhew squeezes his hands in hers before turning to say, “You, Jane!  Stop kicking up such a mess and get on in the buggy.”

 

Sam holds the horse’s head until Mrs. Mayhew has the reins firmly in hand and Jane is seated right beside her.

 

Dean waves, calling, “Thank you,” another time for good measure.  Jane offers a shy half-wave and a little smile as they pull away, Mrs. Mayhew crying, “Get on up there, Daisy,” and slapping a line of dust from the mare’s rump with the outside rein.

 

Sam stands uncertainly at the edge of the drive nearest the porch, not really looking at Dean but not looking away, either.

 

The air is strangely heavy, still, the sounds from the barn—of Custer and the mules stomping and calling for their dinners—and of a crow in the uppermost reach of the praying tree dampened, like the world is wrapped in wet cloth.

 

“Storm’s coming,” Sam says, still not looking at Dean.

 

“Best come inside,” Dean answers by way of reconciling.

 

Sam looks up then, something ancient and unreadable in his eyes.  It makes Dean shiver, makes something down low in his belly stir and slither.

 

He takes a shuddering breath and retreats, turning rapidly on his heel to hightail it through the kitchen door and back down the hall to their grandfather’s room.  By the echoing slap of the screen door, he knows that Sam has followed him inside.

 

Grandfather’s dozing again, so Dean takes the time to wash up in the kitchen sink, trying to soak his head to clear it from the dull, throbbing ache that’s taken up residence behind his eyes.  It’s lack of sleep and the strain of Grandfather’s state, Dean’s sure, nothing to do at all with Sam, who he can feel in the next room, silent in the darkened parlor but present all the same, as if he were standing right behind Dean.

 

When he returns to Grandfather’s bedside, damp-collared and wet-eyed, the old man is awake again.

 

“Revelation,” is all he says, and Dean begins to comply, sitting down and opening the bible to where they’d left off, with the Whore on her seven-headed beast.

 

“’And in her hand a cup full of abomination and the filthiness of her fornications,’” Grandfather intoned as Dean read the words.

 

Before he could continue, Grandfather had reached his hand out and covered the page.

 

“Abomination,” he whispered as if across a great chasm.  “I know abomination,” he said, stronger, his hand shaking against the bible so that it slipped from Dean’s hands and fell with a slap to the floor, closing.

 

In the breathing silence of the moment, every hair on Dean’s neck standing up, he hears a shriek as of a woman dying in great agony, and realizes only belatedly that it’s the wind, coming unfettered across the plains and screaming through the eaves.

 

Shivering, Dean bends to retrieve the bible with one hand and clasps Grandfather’s shaking hand with the other.

 

“It’s alright, Pawpa,” Dean tries to say, having to clear his throat twice before he can get the words out.  “It’s just the wind.”  He’s not sure who he’s trying to comfort.

 

He doesn’t have much appetite for the end times, so Dean moves Grandfather’s hand back to the bed and opens to Psalm 116, picking his way through the verses for the parts best suited to calm them both.

 

“‘The pains of death surrounded me,

         And the pangs of Sheol laid hold of me;

         I found trouble and sorrow.

Then I called upon the name of the LORD:

         “O Lord, I implore You, deliver my soul!”

        

Gracious is the Lord, and righteous;

         Yes, our God is merciful.

The Lord preserves the simple;

         I was brought low, and He saved me.

 Return to your rest, O my soul,

         For the Lord has dealt bountifully with you.

        

 For You have delivered my soul from death,

         My eyes from tears,

         And my feet from falling.

 I will walk before the Lord

         In the land of the living.

        

  I will take up the cup of salv—’”

 

“I don’t deserve salvation,” Grandfather interrupts.  “I’ve harbored abomination.  I’ve drunk of the cup of filthiness.”

 

Dean suppresses a shiver as he takes in his Grandfather’s expression—bleak and terrified, like he’s seeing visions of horrors Dean doesn’t care to imagine.

 

“Your brother—“ he begins, and Dean shifts in his seat, makes an involuntary sound of protest.

 

“He’s abomination and filth, Dean.  He’s not your brother.”

 

Dean closes the bible with a snap and moves to rise, wanting out of the little room and away from the breath-fugged air and the old man’s hateful accusations.

He wants to pretend he’s not listening, knows the old man is out of his head, not responsible for his words.  Still, Dean hates to hear Grandfather speak of Sam in such a way.

 

“Listen,” Grandfather hisses, and there’s an intensity of venom in the sound that raises Dean’s hackles, roots him to the spot, hands tight on the seat of the chair, nails digging into the varnished wood.

 

“Samuel’s not your brother, Dean.  He came from your mother, but he is not hers, either.  He came to her out of the devil.  We’d always hoped it might be a mistake, that Samuel was begotten of your father’s love, but it was clear when he was born that he wasn’t right.  The midwife refused to handle him, said he had the mark of the devil.”

 

Fear of a different sort snakes its cold way up Dean’s spine.  Sam’s mark—it can’t be.

 

“It’s a birthmark, Pawpa, you know that.  Just a mark.  And besides, those are old wives’ tales, nothing but superstition and nonsense.”

 

But Grandfather’s having none of it, head shaking frantically side to side on the pillow.

 

  1. Remember that:   You can’t kill the devil, burn him though you will.”



 

“Pawpa, Mama and Papa died of illness, remember?  It’s the same one that took your sight.  Sam was just a baby, and I was a little boy.  Remember, Pawpa?  It was a sickness.”

 

“Sickness, alright, from the Devil himself.  He’s got the mark, Dean.  You cannot deny it!”

 

And Sam does have a mark, an almost perfect crescent moon laid on its back, points upward, just at the small of his back. 

 

They’d never thought much of it as kids, not until the summer when Sam was eight and Dean was twelve, old enough to go into town if he wanted, old enough to let Sam tag along and keep an eye on him.

 

They’d ended up at the swimming hole on the creek for which the town was named, where some enterprising older boy had hung a hank of hempen rope they’d use to swing out over the deepest part and let go, plunging into the shock of cold water below.

 

Dean had discovered the swimming hole just that summer, had taken to coming there with Lewell Brady and Slim Hanks and the other boys.  They’d welcomed him into their group after some consideration, deciding he wasn’t too bad for a minister’s kid.

 

All that had changed the day he’d brought Sam along.

 

Sammy hadn’t known how to swim, of course, but that hadn’t stopped him for more than a minute.  He’d stood on the bank, six feet above the water, watching the bigger boys dare each other into wild arcs out over the water.

 

And quick as anything, Sam had seen his chance, shucked his shirt and shoes, and leapt for the rope himself, swinging high and wide out over the water, letting go at the last possible instant, plummeting down into the water with a shout of triumph drowned out as his head went under.

Dean remembers even now the sensation of waiting for Sam to resurface, watching the water smooth the ripples outward from where his head had disappeared, looking for movement, any sign that Sam was coming up for air.

  
Nothing.

 

It couldn’t have been more than a minute or two at most, but it felt like a lifetime went by, until Dean had been just about to jump in himself.

 

Sam had burst upward like geyser, laughing as if he hadn’t stopped once since he went under water.  He’d shaken his head and a storm of sun-caught droplets spread out from him as he paddled to the bank like a dog and used the exposed roots of the tree like a ladder to climb back onto the sandy soil.

 

Dean hadn’t known whether to hug him or hit him.  He hadn’t quite decided on an appropriate response when Lewell said, “What the hell?”

 

Dean had tracked the other boy’s disgusted gaze to his little brother’s back, saw that the others had caught the same look and were also staring.

 

“It’s just a birthmark,” Dean had said preemptively, putting a little warning in it.

  
“Like hell,” Slim threw in, coming closer, like he might want to touch it.

 

Dean pulled Sam around so his back was out of sight of the other boys.

 

“It’s nothing,” Dean had repeated, voice growing cold and hard.

 

“Them’s devil’s horns,” Lewell had insisted, eyes ticking from Sam to Dean and back to Sam.  “I never woulda believed it if I hadn’ta seen it for myself.  People said you was strange, but I didn’t believe ‘em— ‘til now.”

 

“You’ve got the mark of the devil on you, boy,” Slim had said, shoving Sam hard with the flat of one big hand.

 

Dean had stepped in front of his brother, bumped chests with Slim.  “You care to pick on someone your own size, Slim?”

 

Slim had made the mistake most people did in underestimating Dean because he was a preacher’s grandkid.

 

When the whole thing was over, the other boys licked, every one of them bloodied and his own knuckles scraped raw, Dean had said, “You keep your dirty mouths off my brother, you hear?  I don’t want to hear another word of this in town.”

 

Slim had nodded sullenly, Lewell and the other boys parroting the motion. 

 

“You’re still welcome here,” Lewell had said then, trying to save some face.  “Just don’t bring _him_ with you when you come.”

 

Of course, Dean had never gone back to the swimming hole. 

And Sam had never again taken his shirt off out of doors.

 

“It’s just a birthmark,” Dean whispers insistently, willing Grandfather to keep his voice down, hoping the old man will follow his example.

 

“Listen to me!  Your father died hunting the thing that made your brother, Dean.  He died and I was blinded.  I tracked them both through the desert—the hunter and the hunted.  And I came upon a pillar of fire in the waste, and it was your father, burning.  Burning with hellfire, eyes aglow.  He spoke to me out of the flames, and it wasn’t his voice but the mouth of Hell, and it said, ‘And the lamb will lie down with the lion, and the lion will be devoured, for the lamb is abomination.’  And I was struck blind as if two stars had fallen into my eyes.”

 

Grandfather’s breathing is labored, his brow slick with sweat, eyes wide and staring.

 

“Pawpa, hush,” Dean says, wanting to silence the old man.  “Hush.”

 

“And I’m blessed to be blind so I do not have to look upon the horror I harbor in my own house.  Dean!”  
  


At last, Dean pries his fingers from the chair seat and stands, his knees stiff, head reeling with the sudden movement.  He stumbles a step to the bed, sinks onto the edge of it.

  
Grandfather finds his left hand and clutches it feebly between both of his own.  “You have to drive him away, Dean, before it’s too late.  Drive Sam out into the desert, let his father find him there.  Don’t let him hurt any more innocent girls, and for the love of God and his Son, Jesus, don’t let him tempt _you_ , Dean.  Remember Christ’s words to the devil, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan!’  Whatever you do, Dean, don’t lie down with the lamb.  Don’t lie down with him.  Don’t—“

 

Dean lunges upward from the bed, tearing his hand easily from his Grandfather’s feeble grasp, stumbling from the room, hand over his mouth to stop the surge of bitter bile climbing up his throat.

 

He barely makes it to the sink, spewing a yellow stream, heaving his dinner after it, unable to catch his breath, tears and snot streaming from him, sobs catching at his throat, choking him.

 

Even caught in the putrid stench of his own sick and through the roaring in his head from the pressure of blood behind his ears, Dean recognizes at last a warm, solid hand on his back, making slow circles.  He’s staring out into the blackness of the storm-tossed yard, hearing the wind throwing itself against the panes, seeing the suggestion of tortured branches in the vestige of light cast out from a lantern in the barn.

 

Lucas must be out there.

 

“Sam?” Dean roughs, hacking and spitting another glob of brownish muck into the sink.

 

With his other hand, Sam works the pump, washing the evidence of Dean’s weakness down the drain.

  
“You okay?”  Sam says softly, not stopping the comforting motion of his hand on Dean’s back.

 

Dean realizes his shoulders are shaking—his whole body, in fact—and that he’s holding himself up against the sink edge with only the tenuous and failing strength of his forearms.  He nods brokenly and pushes himself away from the sink.

 

“Fine,” he whispers, clears his throat, tries again.  “I’m fine, Sam.  How much of that did you hear?”

 

As if in answer to Dean’s question, the wind outside rises to a banshee scream and Dean shivers.

 

Sam’s lips thin and his eyes shutter.  “Enough.”

 

“He’s out of his head with the sickness, Sammy.  You can’t listen to him.”

 

“You did.”

 

It’s not accusation.  There’s a quiet resignation in Sam’s tone, as if he’s just accepted a death sentence and is only awaiting sunrise on gallows day.

 

“No, Sam.  No.”  Dean’s shaking his head convulsively, wiping wretch-tears from his eyes, snot from his upper lip with the kitchen towel.  “It’s not true.  None of what he said.”

 

“You sure?”

 

This brings Dean’s eyes up from where they’d been staring sightlessly at the scarred wooden tabletop.  Sam’s eyes are dark and knowing, and he’s wearing a strange smile all out of keeping with the seriousness of what they’re discussing.

  
“Of course I’m sure, Samuel.  What kind of question is that?”

 

“I’ve always been different, Dean.  You know that.  And I have the mark—“

 

“It’s a birthmark, Sam, nothing more.  Don’t listen to the old man.  He’s out of his head, that’s all.”

 

“And the girls?”

 

“We both know who’s responsible for that!”

 

“Dean,” Sam says, something pleading and hopeless in the way he says his brother’s name, and despite his still shaking knees and the watery roll of his stomach, Dean pushes himself back from the table, rises, and turns to face Sam.

 

They’re a step away from each other, less than an arm’s length, and from that distance, Dean can see Sam’s quickened breath, the tension at the corners of his mouth, the telltale glitter of unshed tears in his eyes.

 

“Sam,” Dean says, pleading of his own in the name, and raises his hands to bracket Sam’s shoulders.

  
With a noise of pain, like something’s tearing inside of him, Sam slips free of Dean’s hands and shoves into him with enough force that Dean’s hips strike the table and send it screeling back several inches.  For a hanging second, Dean’s lost his balance, the world tilting wildly, and then Sam’s hands are on him, hauling him forward, hips to hips, hard line of Sam’s cock immediate and shocking, even through their trousers.

 

“Sam?” Dean asks, and his voice sounds like someone else’s.

 

“Shh,” Sam soothes, raising his lips toward Dean’s mouth.  “Shh!” he breathes, a hot wash over Dean’s closed lips, and Dean parts them, letting Sam’s tongue sneak inside.  He tastes pork roast and gravy on his brother’s tongue, wonders for an instant what Sam is tasting on his own when he remembers—

 

“Don’t!  I’ve—“

 

But Sam’s tongue muffles further protest, delving into Dean’s mouth, sliding over the surface of his tongue, plunging suggestively in time with the tiny, rocking motion of Sam’s hips against Dean’s.

“I like the taste,” Sam says after a long while, when Dean’s almost forgotten what words mean.  Dean eats whatever else Sam was going to say from his brother’s mouth, chases Sam’s tongue, takes up residence in the hot, wet place where their mouths meet.

 

Sam’s hips stutter against Dean’s and their cocks meet.

 

It’s so sudden a sensation, like being struck by lightning, and it drives from Dean any last hint of resistance.  He breaks from Sam’s grip on his shoulders, mirrors the motion with his own big hands, walks Sam backward until his head strikes the parlor doorframe, and grinds against him desperately, driving his cock against Sam’s leg, feeling the bite of the zipper through the worn cotton of his shorts, hearing Sam’s bark of surprise and pain as he experiences the bite of his own.

 

Dean shoves his thigh up between Sam’s legs, levers Sam onto his toes, and grabs his brother’s chin with one vise-like hand.  Holding Sam still, Dean takes his mouth, bites his lip, gags him with his tongue, a stream of constant, breathy curses spewing from his mouth as Sam rocks and tries to bring them into contact once more.

 

From down the hallway Dean hears, “Do not lie down with the lamb!  Get thee behind me!” but he’s beyond caring for the old man’s admonitions, beyond caring that this is his brother, his little brother, that what they’re doing is a sin against God and man, against everything Dean stands for, against the very fabric of the world.

 

The world can end with the shrieking wind if it means he can have the weight of his brother’s cock in his hand, as he does now, his hand sliding with surprising ease behind the cotton barriers of Sam’s clothes, the heat of the flesh and the soft skin a contrast to the iron strength of his brother’s urge and the way his cock fills even more as Dean holds it.

 

“Dean, don’t,” Sam warns, but he’s not saying no, Dean knows it, just as he knows that the pearl of fluid he smears between his two fingers will taste bitter and salty when he brings it to his mouth.

  
He’s right.

  
Sam’s face is flushed, the color high in his cheeks, his eyes wide and wild with wanting, and Dean says, “Upstairs,” as he drops his knee and lets Sam free to move.

 

Sam stumbles, and Dean rights him with a firm hand on his shoulder, which he slides to his brother’s ass as Sam makes his uneven way up the stairs to their bedroom.

 

Even over the constant keening of wind in the eaves, they can hear their grandfather’s baritone shouts, but Dean cannot make out the words, and he doesn’t try, too preoccupied with untying his boots, stepping out of them, stripping socks, trousers, shorts, shrugging out of his jacket, unbuttoning his shirt, the urge to be naked immediate and undeniable.

When he’s left his clothes in an uncharacteristic heap, he turns to see Sam stripped free of his own clothes, standing beside his narrow, unmade bed, long lines of his body trembling in the uncertain light of the lantern Sam must have lit.

 

His brother’s cock should be a mystery, but Dean drinks it in, the way it juts upward toward Sam’s belly, long and full, rising from a nest of dark curls that Dean cannot help but touch, scraping his fingers through them upward toward Sam’s belly, Sam shivering and gasping under Dean’s roaming hand.

 

“Lie down,” he says then, taking his hand away, and Sam does as he’s told, stretching out on the bed, spreading his legs, waiting.

 

Waiting for his brother to lie down with him.

 

When he does, Dean’s first impression is of heat, so much in contrast to the drafty air of the room that it makes Dean dizzy.  Under him, Sam moans, and Dean feels his little brother’s need where their groins touch, feels it in the judder and leap of Sam’s cock against Dean’s where they’re trapped by Dean’s weight.

 

Dean slides a little, and the skin of his cock catches on Sam’s, and they both moan.  Then Dean lets all of his weight fall, catches Sam’s surprised expulsion of breath in his own mouth as he shoves his tongue into Sam’s, like he’d gag his brother, like he’d smother him, their lips hard together, and Dean can feel the outline of Sam’s teeth against his lip, can feel the way his brother’s chest struggles to expand, the way Sam’s tongue jumps as he tries and fails to open his mouth far enough to get a breath around Dean’s seeking tongue.

 

Only when Sam is starting to shake under Dean does he relent, lifting his mouth away so Sam can take a great gulp of air, releasing it with Dean’s name on a long, shivering wave, and Dean feels a wetness between them that tells him his little brother has already spent.

 

Dean pushes himself up onto his knees to examine the product of Sam’s release, dragging his fingertips through the glistening mess on Sam’s belly and then wrapping his fingers around his own cock, pulling back the foreskin, smearing Sam’s seed all over himself until his cock, too, shines in the guttering light of the lantern.

 

Sam’s eyes are wide on Dean’s as Dean moves his hand between Sam’s legs, seeking and finding the puckered hole, worming a finger inside of him.  Sam bucks and jumps, squirming, and Dean presses him to the bed with the splayed fingers of his other hand on Sam’s belly.

 

Sam whines around the intrusion, face scrunched up, eyes narrowed, but he doesn’t protest, not even as Dean adds a second finger, feeling the impossible tightness of his brother’s forbidden place, the way the flesh resists him, the way his brother’s panicked breath makes his hand jump on Sam’s damp abdomen.

 

He pulls his fingers out, makes another pass through the already drying evidence of Sam’s release, slicks himself again and lines himself up, head bumping against the tight bud.  He pauses then, eyes on Sam’s as he starts to push ahead, fighting against the urge to force his way in, afraid his brother might unman him with the way his muscles are tensing around the head.

 

“Dean,” Sam wheezes, eyes tight-closed, tears sliding from them, “Dean,” he begs, but Dean’s relentless, too far gone or gone too far to stop.  He pushes ahead, slow and inexorable, feeling the flesh give only with great friction, the heat ferocious, tension painful. 

 

He doesn’t care if this undoes them both.  Doesn’t care if it kills them.  Maybe it should.

 

Dean’s never been inside anyone, not a girl, not a boy, not even a hapless animal, unlike what he’s heard of some of the other young men of the town.  He’s never done business at Miz Elizabeth’s in Cartridge, never been tempted to take a trip to K.C., where no one knows he’s a preacher in training.

 

He’d only had his hand, guilty and rough on those occasions when he couldn’t will his hard flesh to subside without touch.

 

This is something else.  It’s hellfire and damnation and every filthy dream he’s ever had of Sam, who is stretched out under him, panting and in pain, face streaked with tears, body fighting Dean for every inch.  Still, he pushes ahead, burying himself until he can feel Sam’s wiry hair against the sweaty skin of his lower belly.

 

Sam’s face is an ugly red, contorted in the lantern-light, and Dean whispers, “Shh, it’s alright now.  It’s alright,” as he starts to rock, slowly at first, just an experiment to ease the incredible tightness of his brother’s flesh around him.

 

It brings a sound out of Sam, though, like a cornered animal at last giving up its life, and Dean fixes his eyes on the wreck of his brother’s face as he rocks again, deeper still, and Sam’s eyes fly open.

  
He chokes out, “Dean!” and Dean repeats the motion, Sam’s knees coming up to seize Dean’s hips, allowing Dean to fit even more snugly against his body.

 

“Dean,” Sam begs, voice the husk of something skittering along a fence rail in a high wind.  Dean shivers and pulls away, plunges back, and Sam arches his back, hisses Dean’s name, and Dean is struck blind by it all, the heat of his brother wrapped around his cock, the way they’re connected, Sam’s muscles pulsing around him, the hair on his brother’s legs scratching against his hips, their harsh breath hardly audible against the rising wind, and under the cacophony of their joining, deep and low, the muttering of their Grandfather from the floor below.

 

Dean shouts his release, teeth clenched, eyes closed, feeling Sam’s channel clutching him as he lets go, Sam’s hands scrabbling weakly at his chest as he thrusts and thrusts and thrusts, shouting until his voice is gone, carried away in the rending wind that rips the world away from Dean as he spends himself endlessly, pulsing and pulsing and pulsing, and then collapses, blind and deaf, the enormity of his sin crushing the breath out of him.

 

Dimly, he feels Sam shove him off, shake him, and dimly, Dean grows aware again, of the cooling fluid on his flaccid cock, of his heaving breaths, of Sam’s sweaty hand on his arm.  But Dean can’t make himself open his eyes, can’t make himself understand Sam’s frantic questions.

 

Can’t answer.

 

He feels Sam leave the bed, wants to say, “Stay,” wants to assure his brother that it’s alright.

 

But it’s not.

 

They’ve fallen beyond the reach of redemption, and not even the mountain nor the sea nor the grave itself can hide them from the Lord’s wrath.

A wave of greater darkness sweeps behind Dean’s tightly closed eyes, and he gives in to the dizziness, letting go as he’s pulled under. 

 

The still grey silence of early morning breaks across Dean’s eyes as he levers them open.  He can see his clothes strewn about by his own impatience, can feel the itchy evidence of their sin on the sheet beneath his stomach.

 

Sick with the smell of it, Dean pushes himself up onto his hands and glances down at the bed, unsurprised to find a dark shape where his brother’s blood has stained the sheet.  There should be a mark of what they’ve done, and Dean has to swallow around the sudden swell of pride in his chest.

 

He’s done this to Sam.  Sam is his now, no one else’s, not ever.

 

Then Dean remembers his brother’s pain, the sounds he made, and Dean’s ashamed and aroused in equal measures, rising from the bed naked and half-hard and covered in snail-trails of dried seed and blood to scrounge up his unwashed shorts and trousers, to climb back into the stale Sunday clothes that he’d worn only the day before to preach to his people.

 

His people, who would hang him from the prayer tree for what he’d done here last night.

 

It’s only as this thought assaults his imagination that Dean’s struck by the unnatural silence of the place.  No storm winds.  No Sam.  No Grandfather railing from the floor below.

 

Disregarding for the moment the last detail, Dean clatters down the stairs and spares a glance for the empty parlor before heading outside, where he’s stunned into stillness by the catastrophe that greets him.

 

Where the chicken coop once stood is a pile of splintered kindling.  Around it, two or three hens peck and cluck through a welter of blood and feathers, all that’s left of the flock.

 

Finally ungluing himself from the porch, Dean moves toward the barn, half afraid of what he’ll find there.  To his left, he sees that the praying tree has toppled, its roots like monstrous snakes exposed and frozen in the quiet air.  The crown of the tree had struck the windmill, knocking it backward, so that it’s suspended now, askew, as though startled by the violence it witnessed.

 

“Sam?” he calls as he shoves open the barn door and steps into the dust-addled dimness.  Custer and the mules answer him, complaining, overdue for their morning feeding and still unsettled from the night’s weather.

 

There’s no answer.  Dean climbs the ladder to the loft before even seeing to the animals.  He knows he should leave it be, but he has to see if Sam is up there, imagining all kinds of scenarios, most of them involving Sam the way he looked just before Dean spent himself inside of him.

 

Then he remembers that Sam is his, and he knows he has nothing to fear, not from the boy in their barn, anyway.

 

Nothing.  Relieved and deeply uneasy at the same time, Dean climbs back down to the barn floor and sees to the animals.  Other than the damage to the paddock, the barn seems more or less untouched.  He’ll have to get up on the roof sometime that week to check it, but from inside, at any rate, it appears whole and sound.

 

He climbs back into the loft to check on the state of the hay and to make sure none of it got wet.  Wet hay catches fire—Elijah Burden lost his whole barn, three mules, and six milking cows last spring when his damp hay combusted.  From what Dean can tell, there was no leaking here, either, and even on the highest stacks, those nearest the roof, there’s no dampness or unusual heat.

 

Back down on the barn floor, Dean hesitates.  He should go in the house and see to Grandfather, but he can’t bring himself to do it.  He has the sense that if Grandfather so much as looks at Dean, he’ll know.  Know what Dean and his brother were doing last night. 

 

Know that Dean plans to do it again, often, now that he’s damned for good and for ever.

 

So he cleans up around the coop as best he can, heedless of the muck he’s slopping onto his good Sunday clothes.  There’s not much he can do about the blood, but he rakes up the splintered wood and shovels up the worst of the gore, burying it in a hole to keep it from attracting coyotes.

 

Then he gets some chicken wire from the barn and hammers together a temporary enclosure with salvaged wood from the coop, just to keep the remainder of the flock—all three of them—from getting eaten by whatever hungry thing comes sniffing around there in the dark of night.

 

As he’s returning the wire roll to the barn, the rear hay door gapes open and reveals Lucas and Sam silhouetted against the morning sun.

 

When they near, Dean can see they both look like the storm got the worst of them.  Sam’s got a long, glancing cut down his left cheek, and Lucas is sporting a goose-egg over one eye, already purpling.

 

“You alright?” Dean asks, eyes all for Sam.  “Where were you?”

 

Sam shrugs and doesn’t answer, brushing past Dean without a word to Lucas, either.

 

Lucas climbs the ladder wordlessly and disappears into the hay loft.

 

Dean turns to follow Sam, who’s gotten as far as the makeshift coop when four riders turn in at the end of the drive.

  
They’ve got a quarter-mile to watch them come, letting Dean get a step ahead and a little in front of his brother before Sheriff Grady, Purdy Jones, Jeremiah Knox, and Jed Willard pull up hard not three yards from where the brothers are standing.

 

Dean tries not to blink in the cloud of dust they’ve raised, just nods shortly to Sheriff Grady and waits for the worse that’s yet to come.  He figures Willard’s pulling something here to try to prevent Dean from getting the money that’s rightfully the church’s.

 

“You killed my girl!” isn’t the accusation Dean was expecting.  The man’s trembling finger points at Sam.

 

“What girl?” Dean asks dumbly, unable to get his head around what he’s hearing.

 

“You know what girl!  He hit her yesterday in front of God and everybody!  Half a dozen people saw it!  And then he came back in the middle of the night and finished what he started, waited ‘til dark like the animal he is to tear her from her bed and do that to her and then kill her!”

Willard’s eyes blaze, spittle gathering at the corners of his lips, as he screams, “You’re goin’ to hang for it, boy!  You’re goin’ to die for what you done to my sweet Delilah!  My poor, poor—”

 

Too distressed to go on, Willard peters off to mumbling and weeping, hanging limp in the saddle like he’d fall off if it weren’t for his boots planted firmly in the stirrups.

 

Bud Grady looks like he’d rather be ten miles away in the center of a twister than sitting on his horse again in the Winchesters’ drive.

 

“How’d you get that cut, Sam?” the Sheriff asks, and Dean shoots a warning look to Sam before answering. 

 

“Sam was home all night, helping with Grandfather.  He went out when we heard the coop go to see if he couldn’t save the chickens.  He got cut by flying debris.”

 

The lies roll off his tongue like scripture, and Dean doesn’t even blush for it.  Given Sam’s actual alibi, lying is a far lesser sin.  He doesn’t let himself think about the hours he spent unconscious, when Sam could have been anywhere at all, nor does he consider how Sam actually got the scratch on his face.

 

His story will hold.  It has to hold.

 

“Mind if I speak to the Reverend?”  Grady’s expression says it isn’t really a request.

 

Dean nods and gestures toward the house.  “Please,” he says, investing it with every Sunday sincerity he could muster.  Next to him, Sam shifts nervously, and Dean has a sudden premonition of what the sheriff is going to find.

 

“I know you done it,” Willard growls, bloodshot eyes fixing on Sam.  Dean hears his brother’s indrawn breath, knows he’s going to say something.  He shakes his head, hoping Sam’s watching for the cue, and says, “Jed, I’m awfully sorry to hear about Miss Delilah.  How’s Judith?  She alright?”

 

But Willard doesn’t so much as acknowledge Dean’s question, and Dean’s about to ask something else when the screen door signals the sheriff’s return.

 

Dean can see in Bud’s face what he’s about to say.

  
“How is it you didn’t know your granddaddy was dead, Dean?”  Bud’s voice is just the near side of accusation, but Dean doesn’t have to feign the shock he feels zing through him, kicking his heart to racing and choking him with it.

 

“I—“  Dean starts, but he’s not sure what to say.

 

“Dean’s been out here with me trying to clean up the yard,” Sam answers for him. 

 

Grady’s eyes track over Sam and then Dean, taking in the blood on Dean’s shirt, the feathers stuck to the knees of his trousers.  He nods once, tightly, accepting the evidence of his eyes.  Both brothers look like they’ve tried to outrun a steam engine and lost.

 

“I need to see the boy,” Grady says then, already moving toward the barn.

 

“It ain’t the other one!” Jed shouts even as Sam is saying, “He didn’t do it.  He was in the barn the whole night.”

 

The sheriff pauses and turns back to face them.  “You say you saw that Lucas boy asleep in the barn all night?  How’s that Sam?  I thought you were inside tending your grandfather and out here saving the chickens.”

 

The slyness warns Dean that Bud Grady’s lost his patience with Sam, and Dean reaches out a hand to touch Sam’s shoulder, hoping Sam gets the message.

 

“Sam’s just trying to protect his friend, Sheriff.  You can talk to Lucas yourself.  He’s in the loft, last I saw him.”

 

Grady narrows his eyes.  “And when was this?”

 

“A few minutes ago, when I went out to feed the animals.”

 

Grady nods tightly and strides toward the barn, the tension in his back signal enough that they should all stay put right where they are.

 

Grady returns a few minutes later with Lucas in tow.  The boy’s face is red, the raised mark of a handprint clear against his pale skin.  His eyes are watery, like he’s been crying, his hair is sticking up like he combed it with a corncob, and his feet are bare and dusty.

 

“I’m tellin’ you it ain’t him, Sheriff,” Willard insists, drilling the sheriff with his manic gaze.  “I heard a ruckus in the yard, and when I looked out, I saw Sam slinking around the back of the barn.”

 

“You saw it in the middle of the storm?” Dean asks, doubt evident in his tone.

 

“There was a flash of lightning,” Willard insists.

 

Knox throws in, “It was dry lightnin’, like God huntin’ sinners.”

 

“He musta been mighty angry,” Jones adds, nodding vigorously.  “I never seen anythin’ like it in all my born days.”

 

Willard’s eyes fixed on him, the Sheriff wavers, uncertain. 

 

Dean presses his point.  “While I’m sorry for the Willards, Sheriff, I know for a fact that my brother was with me all night.  I also happen to know Mr. Willard and I have recently had a difference of opinion regarding the church building fund, and he might have some reason to have his mind fixed on the Winchester family in particular these days.  It’s understandable, given the terrible events of last night, that he was mistaken in what he thought he saw.  There’s no harm done.  Sam and I aren’t going anywhere.  We have a funeral to arrange, after all.  And I promise to keep the other boy close, make sure he stays on our place.  It’s probably best you not try taking him into town just now anyway.”

 

There’s a lot Dean leaves out, but his message seems to reach Sheriff Grady, whose tight nod and grim eyes amply indicate his disquiet with the whole affair.  The fact is, with anger and fear running high in the town, the safest place for Lucas is the Winchester farm.  They’re far enough out of the way that a mob would blow itself out before it reached within a mile of their drive.

When Grady moves to remount, leaving Lucas standing where he’d stopped, Willard protests loudly.

 

“That’s it?  You’re just gonna let ‘em both go?  You aren’t goin’ to arrest either one of ‘em?  They done it, Sheriff, one or ‘tother.  I saw him, I told you.  A tall boy their age, dark hair, slim.”

 

“I’m sorry, Jed, but that describes half the boys in Sweetbranch and a lot of the cowboys down Cimarron way, too.  They aren’t goin’ anywhere, Jed.  Isn’t that right, Dean?”

 

Dean nods.  “Yessir.  Sam and I and the—Lucas—we’ll stay close.  As I said, we have a funeral to attend to.”

 

Clearly uneasy but also as obviously weary, the sheriff climbs into the saddle and turns his horse’s head toward the road.  “Keep close, Dean.  It’d be a good idea if you and yours avoided town for the time being.”

 

Dean nods, fear stirring its cold fingers in his belly. 

 

“I’ll let the missus know about the Reverend.  She’ll spread the word.”

 

“Thank you, Bud,” Dean answers, deliberately using the man’s Christian name, reminding him of the connection Grady’s had with the Winchesters for practically the whole of Dean’s life.

 

But the Sheriff jogs off without another word, the other men following his lead, only Willard holding back for a span of receding hoofbeats to stare balefully at Sam and mutter something that might have been a threat or maybe a curse under his breath.

 

“Get back to the barn and stay there,” Dean orders, not bothering to look at Lucas.  By his tone alone, the boy should know that Dean’s done with him.  One wrong word, and Dean swears, he’ll kill the boy himself.

 

His naked feet make nary a sound on the dust of the driveway.

 

The air is the yellow of wheat chaff, everything awash in an obscuring light.

 

“I have to tend to Grandfather’s—to Grandfather,” Dean says shortly, not looking at Sam.  He can’t, not now.  Part of him wants to slap Sam for running out into the storm, for making Dean doubt his little brother.  Another part—by far the stronger—wants to lay him down in the dirt and mark them both with the mortal earth they’re going to become when they’ve died.

 

No eternity in heaven for them, just the filth of man’s original sin.

 

Maybe it’s lack of sleep or the strangeness of the air after a terrible storm, but Dean feels giddy with it, like in sinning he’s been set free of so many of the things that held him back.  Already, he’s planning his Grandfather’s funeral sermon, a sweeping psalm to a life spent in service and dire warning about falling short of salvation.

 

Unable to put voice to any of it just yet, though, Dean settles for heading back inside, reluctant to touch his Grandfather’s cold flesh but wanting it over with as soon as can be.

 

Women should be arriving shortly to help sit vigil, he knows, and they’ll bring bread and sweets and cold meats, things that’ll keep while the boys get their feet under them.  That’s what they’ll call Sam and Dean in the women-soft privacy of their murmuring vigil—“The boys”—in solemn voices laced with eager pity.

 

But until then, it’s up to Dean to take care of the least pleasant parts of tending to the dead.

 

It’s not like Dean hasn’t had some practice.  How many deathbeds has he himself knelt beside, praying the passing into the afterlife, smelling the stench of death as the soul lets go, leaving behind a stinking body to be buried like so much unsightly trash?

 

Dean’s always secretly preferred the idea of fire, like he’s read about in history books, but it’s un-Christian-like, his Grandfather had insisted, and Dean isn’t about to commit such a sacrilege on his Pawpa’s body.

 

Such a thing is good enough for the likes of Dean and Sam, though.  After all, hasn’t his corrupt flesh already been afire?  
  


The lingering giddiness dissipates when he’s faced with the figure of his grandfather, whose eyes are still open, staring into the impossible void, blind eternally now.

  
It means something that Bud Grady didn’t bother to close them, maybe the sheriff’s way of indicting Dean for his carelessness.

 

As Dean considers what he was likely doing when Grandfather died, a weight of guilt falls upon him, bowing his head on his neck until he’s sure it’ll snap.  He can’t cross the room to the bedside, can’t bear the thought of laying his impure hands—hands that were inside and all over his brother just hours before—on Pawpa’s defenseless corpse.

 

Shaking with remorse, gasping for air, Dean drags his feet across the floor until he’s beside the bed.  It seems to take forever to find the courage to look into his Grandfather’s dead face, to close his sightless eyes, but at last, Dean finds it in him, and once that barrier has been breached, he feels firmer of purpose.

 

The sheets are soiled, of course, and Grandfather’s night shirt, as well, and it makes better sense to have Sam help him, but Dean can’t do it.  Can’t share the space with the brother he defiled, can’t bring Sam face-to-face with the final evidence of their terrible crime:  that their beloved Pawpa died alone and in agony while they writhed in the infernal fire of lust just above him.

 

The stench makes Dean gag, and he welcomes the discomfort, stripping the bed awkwardly, making ungainly efforts to relieve his Pawpa’s stiffening flesh of its filthy cotton gown.

 

Dean’s ashamed of Grandfather’s nakedness, feels as though he’s done something awful by exposing the old man’s shrunken frame to the air.  He makes quick work of cleaning the man’s body, trying not to feel the unnatural tension of the locked muscles or the strange weight of dead flesh as he manipulates his Grandfather’s limbs into his Sunday suit.

 

He doesn’t have the energy to make up the bed, and Dean realizes they don’t have anymore clean sheets, anyway.  He settles for working his grandmother’s quilt back under the body and turning the pillow over to its cleaner side before laying his Pawpa’s head back against it.

 

Finally, he puts into Pawpa’s hands the bible the old man had brought with him when he’d come West to found his church.

 

Then he tries to pray, but the words won’t come.  What can he ask God for anyway?  He’s cast himself out into the cold and dark beyond God’s reach, where there is nothing like forgiveness to be had.  How dare he ask the Lord for anything now, even Grandfather’s safe passage to salvation?

 

Soul-sick and weary, Dean drags himself back down the hallway to the kitchen and slumps into the chair nearest him.

 

In a strange state of suspension, Dean loses track of time, the afternoon hours crawling by, the kitchen filling with diffuse, eerie light.  It’s warmer than it has been yet that season, and the open screen door ushers in a stillness so complete that Dean can hear the quiet complaints of the lonely hens in their temporary home.

 

At last, a shadow intrudes itself upon Dean’s awareness, the strange angle of it and odd shape making him rise to look out the kitchen window, only to see that it’s the tilted windmill grown monstrous and looming in the late afternoon sun.

 

It’s only then, seeing how far the sun has sunk, that Dean realizes no womenfolk have come to sit vigil and pray over his Grandfather’s earthly remains.

 

Ignoring the deep sense of dread his realization dredges up in him, Dean wanders out to the porch and then moves with some purpose toward the barn.  He has to set things right with Sam about last night, let him know that he didn’t mean his silence as censorship.

 

He loves his brother.  Right, wrong.  Saved, damned.  Dean’s done apologizing, since people won’t understand and God isn’t listening.

  
The last person who it mattered to is dead now, anyway.

 

The living have to make their own way now.

 

“Sam?” Dean calls, and a shuffling above precedes Sam’s appearance at the top of the loft ladder.

 

“Can I talk to you?”

 

Sam shrugs grudgingly and climbs down, slouching toward Dean without really looking at him.

 

Dean spares a glance back at the ladder, half expecting to see Lucas eavesdropping.

 

“Come outside?”

 

But Sam shakes his head.  “It’s… .”  He shakes his head again, this time like he’s trying to clear it of a sound that grates on his nerves.  “I don’t like it out there.”

 

Dean casts a surprised glance out the door, sees only the same strange light that’s been hanging over them all day, and concedes that maybe his brother has a point.

 

Who knows what might come from the open sky overhead? 

Holy fire, maybe, or dry lightning.

 

Dean draws Sam further toward the back of the barn, ignoring the way Custer puts his head out of the stall for some attention.  The poor things have been sorely neglected of late, but this isn’t the time for Dean to let himself be distracted.

 

In the dim light where the feed bin meets the back wall, Dean corners Sam, coming up close enough that Sam can’t escape him without an effort.  He wants his brother to listen.

 

“Listen, Sam,” Dean begins, but Sam silences him, mouth pressed urgently to Dean’s, tongue prodding his lips for an opening.

 

Dean pulls back, uses his hands on Sam’s shoulders to keep them a foot apart.

 

“Wait,” Dean says, and he sees Sam’s eyes shutter up, sees the light go out of his face.  “Just…  I’m not saying no, Sam.  But I think we have to talk first.  Please?”

 

Sam nods sullenly and won’t make eye contact, but Dean plunges ahead, hoping that now, when the words are most important, he can find them without the help of the bible.

  
There’s no advice in Psalms for how to best have carnal knowledge of your brother.

 

“I love you.  That’s the first thing you need to hear.  You hear me?”  
  


Sam’s nod this time is uncertain, jerky, his eyes growing hopeful but still wary.

 

“And I want you.  All the time.  And I don’t care that it’s wrong or that we’re going to hell.  I’ll burn for an eternity if I can have you now.  You understand that, Sam?  Even hell can’t keep us apart.  I mean it.”

 

Sam resists Dean’s bracketing hands, trying to make contact between them, but Dean shakes him a little and insists, “I’m not finished.”

 

Sam subsides with a dissatisfied sigh that makes Dean smile a little at his brother’s typical impatience.

 

“But we’ve got to be careful, Sam.  People in town are already suspicious of us.  We can’t give them any reason to suspect what we do when we’re alone together.”

  
Sam seems ready to protest, but Dean cuts him off.

  
“I’m not ashamed of it, Sam.  What happened last night—it felt right, didn’t it?”  And if he sounds unsure, Sam doesn’t seem to notice.

  
“Yes,” Sam breathes, surging under Dean’s hands again.  “Dean, please.”

 

Dean gives in this time, letting Sam have his way, suspecting it’s a pattern he’ll follow for the rest of their lives.  Sam licks at Dean’s lips until Dean lets Sam in, and then for a long time he doesn’t think about consequences.

 

Awash in the heat of his brother’s body where they touch at the knees, their bellies, their mouths, drowning in the heat of Sam’s tongue, the taste of him, deaf to all but the sounds Sam is making, animal noises in the back of his throat, Dean’s unaware of where or when they are, unaware of anything but how good it feels and how much better it would be if he could turn his brother around and take him hard over the feed bin at Sam’s back.

 

A snicker, close enough to them that Dean hears it over the blood rushing in his ears, brings Dean up from Sam’s sucking mouth, and he turns his head to see Lucas standing a yard away, staring, sly smile on his face and eyes avid with malicious hunger.

 

Sam makes an, “Oh,” sound, like he’s surprised or maybe worried, and Dean is spinning away from his brother before he knows what he’s about, grabbing Lucas by the collar of his worn shirt, throwing him up against the stall door, startling a sound out of Custer.

 

Dean’s in a place of rage so removed from the world he used to know that he can’t feel anything—not the way his knuckles split with the force of his blows, not the way the boy’s flesh tears under the pummeling.

 

He doesn’t feel the boy sag in his grip nor the weight of Sam hanging on his flailing arm.

 

Dean feels none of that until gravity does its part to drop Lucas from beneath the range of Dean’s punches.

 

When his fist strikes bare wood instead of flesh and bone, he feels it.

 

Lucas is bundled at his feet, so many bloody rags, and he’s laughing—a wheezing, pained sound, but he’s clearly amused.

 

All at once, Dean’s fury is dowsed with the cold certainty that this is what the boy wanted all along—Dean’s temper, his violence, even what came before:  the brothers’ lust and their inexorable binding.

 

“What are you?” he whispers, horrified at the thing on the floor and the thing that he himself has become. He backs away, only a worried noise from Sam bringing his eyes to his brother, who’s staring at Dean like he’s never seen him before.

 

“Leave him,” Dean orders hoarsely, stumbling toward the barn door, expecting Sam to follow. 

 

Sam does.

 

And maybe he shouldn’t be proud of that, proud that Sam is his so totally that he’d leave a boy bleeding and broken rather than disobey his brother’s command.

 

But Dean is proud of it.  Proud and terrified.

 

As if Sam is reading his mind, he says, “Something’s going to happen.”  He sounds like the little boy he used to be, before everything went wrong, back when they were just brothers and Sam had not yet learned how hurtful the world can be about difference.

 

Dean doesn’t answer, just mounts the porch with heavy treads, pulls open the screen door, steps into the kitchen. 

  
The stench of death lingers in the space, and Dean moves to open the kitchen window to let in some fresher air.  As he does, he feels a breeze coming up, and the curtains hanging limp on the window stir and flutter.

 

“Another storm’s coming,” Sam says, and Dean feels dread like a snake uncurl in his gut.

 

To get his mind off of the doom that’s growing there, Dean sends Sam to the cold cellar for the rest of yesterday’s pork, realizing both that he’s not hungry and that he hasn’t eaten since yesterday.  By the way Sam hands him the covered plate, Dean can tell the same is true for his brother.

  
Still, they should keep up their strength.

 

He slices bread while Sam works the pump handle, discovering only then that there’s no water to be had.

 

“The windmill,” Sam begins, and Dean nods.  The cistern must have cracked when the windmill was wrenched from the pump by the wind.

 

“I’ll fix it when I can,” Dean promises.

 

They’re just sitting down to a cold meal of pork sandwiches when they hear a stampede of hoofbeats, like a giant’s muffled heartbeat, coming on.

 

Sam rises first, and Dean holds out a hand, trapping his brother’s wrist, his grip tight enough to feel the bones shift against his palm.

 

“No.  I’ll go.”

 

But Sam has the advantage of standing strength and wrenches from Dean’s grasp.  “I have to warn Lucas,” Sam insists, already hurrying toward the door and the porch.

 

“Sam!” Dean cries, desperation and terror making his voice thin.  “Don’t,” he pleads, lower.  He hasn’t risen from his seat, feels trapped there by a suffocating doom that’s pressing him earthward, burying him alive.

 

“I have to warn Lucas, Dean.  Please understand.”

 

“Sam!” Dean calls again as Sam pushes through the screen door.  It slaps the frame behind him once, twice.

  
Then Sam’s face is there, but it doesn’t look like him, the screen distorting and darkening his features.

 

“I love you, Dean.  Never forget that,” Sam says, and then he’s gone, and Dean’s out of his seat like he’s pulled by invisible lines attached to his brother.

 

Dean grabs the shotgun from the stove corner and lunges out the door after Sam, skidding to a halt on the edge of the porch as a crowd of men pull up in a storm of dust in the drive.  Jed Willard is in the fore, Noah Bennett and Roger Cornant with him, Knox, of course, and a six or seven others, most of whom Dean recognizes from town.

 

Jed has a lit torch in his left hand.  His right is occupied with the reins, his horse white-eyed, foam-mouthed, skittering and jumping nervously under him.  Just behind him, Bennett carries a heavy hempen rope already tied in a noose.

 

As dangerous as the mob is, though, Dean has to look away, searching out Sam, who, he sees, has gotten as far as the open barn door.

 

“There he is!” shouts Jed, waving the torch wildly toward the barn.  His horse crow-kicks, sidesteps, and Jed hastily dismounts, slapping the animal away from him with an impatient hand.

 

The others likewise climb down from their mounts, but they seem uncertain, holding their horses’ reins and staring at Willard like he’s in charge.

 

“You don’t want to do this, Jed,” Dean says, though his mouth is so dry his tongue feels thick and awkward.  “Sam’s not guilty of anything.”

 

“It’s not Sam we want, boy,” Knox sneers, having apparently gained courage from Jed’s actions.  “We want the foreigner first, see what he knows.  If it turns out he did it, fine.  If not, we’ll be askin’ that freak of yours the same questions.”

 

“You’re not taking anybody or asking any questions.  Sheriff Grady is—“

 

“—a lily-livered Christ-loving coward,” Cornant finishes.  “We’re not with Grady,” he adds ominously.

 

“Get that foreign boy out here, or we’ll go in after him, and if the barn happens to catch fire, it won’t be no fault of ours,” Willard demands, already taking steps toward the barn.

 

“Sam!” Dean calls across the lot.  “Get Lucas out here.  Now!”

 

But he can tell even from this distance that Sam’s wearing his mulish look, and just before he shakes his head no, Sam reaches out to haul the barn door closed.

 

Even as Jed is tearing toward the barn, Dean racing after him, the mob all around him, shouting and shoving, Dean knows they’re going to be too late to stop what happens next.

 

“Sam!  Don’t be a fool!” Dean shouts, but he’s drowned out by Bennett crying, “Go ‘round back and secure the hay doors!”

 

Dean hears Sam fasten the inside chain as Willard tugs futilely on the door handle.  Efforts thwarted, Willard throws his head back and screams, a terrible sound of mingled grief and rage so strong Dean imagines for a minute that that’s what the demons in hell must sound like.

 

If Willard hadn’t cut his eyes toward Dean just then, Dean might not have had an inkling of what the other intended to do, but Dean sees the sly look come over Jed’s face, and he raises the rifle and fires without a thought.

 

Jed staggers back, arms pinwheeling, a blossom of blood blooming on his shirt at the shoulder, and as he falls to the ground, he looses the torch, which lands against the barn wall.

 

Someone shouts and grabs Dean, wrestling the gun from his hand and shoving him, and as he struggles to keep his feet, he hears with horror the bellows sound of fire catching dry wood.

 

“No!” he screams, tearing himself from grasping hands and racing for the barn.  “Sam!  Sam, the barn’s on fire!  Open the door!  Run!”

 

As Dean resists the hands trying to pry him away from the door, he hears Sam inside call his name, just once, “Dean!”

 

“Sam!  Sam!  Go out the back!  Run!” and then turns on the men trying to stop him to plead, “Please!  Please, unbar the hay doors.  Let Sam out.  He didn’t do anything, I swear!  He didn’t do anything!  He’s innocent!”

 

Then his attention is caught by the way the fire is licking its way inexorably up the doorframe, climbing toward the hay loft like it has a purpose. 

 

As if in a dream, Dean watches the slow crawl of the fire, knowing there’s no time left—no time to save Sam or to tell him he loves him.  No time at all.

 

With a furious roar, the hay loft catches, and from inside the barn, Dean hears Custer shriek in terror.

 

“Sam!” he cries, and “Sam!” again, over and over until his voice is hoarse.  Suddenly free of confining hands, hands struck weak by the enormity of what they’ve done, Dean pushes through the dumbstruck crowd and throws himself at the door.

 

The metal handle is hot, and Dean registers that in the moments before he reaches out and wraps his hand around it.  Screaming, he fights the instinct to let it go, uses the last of his strength to throw his shoulder into pulling the door open.

 

It gives a little, the chain slipping on its nail as the doorframe its attached to burns away, and Dean tugs desperately once, twice, a third time, until choking smoke billows out of the six-inch gap he’s made.

 

“Sam!” he shouts into the darkness, pressing his face into that hellish space between the frame and the door, ignoring the stinging cinders that singe his face, unaware that his hair has caught fire until someone grabs him and pulls him away, still crying his brother’s name, though his voice is gone, throat ravaged by the heat and smoke of the inferno.

 

Dean doesn’t remember much after that, only flashes of heat and flames and a dim recollection of someone screaming in agony.

 

He surely doesn’t recall being carried into the parlor or the other men from town showing up, doesn’t hear the hushed, worried voices of women who were already on their way to the farm to sit night vigil with Grandfather’s body and who take care of his funeral, even taking up a collection to donate a stone with a verse from Psalms and Grandfather’s name, John Winchester, to memorialize him forever.

 

Dean learns of it all later, though it’s spoken in a language he no longer seems to recognize.

 

Dean’s lost his words, cannot speak, signals his bare needs with his burned hands and never complains when the women are too rough with the bandages, too impertinent with cleaning him or helping him relieve himself.  He couldn’t complain even if he meant to because he has no voice to speak of, only a pained squawk like carrion crows on the feed.

 

Eventually, Dean’s strong enough to go outside, and it seems impossible that already there are wildflowers growing around the blackened ruin where Dean’s life came to an end.

 

Two months after the fire, Bud Grady rides out to the farm alone and tells Dean what he and his boys found when they sifted through the wreckage.

 

“Your brother’s body was near the door.  Some timbers had pinned him there, and they were too thick to burn through, so we’re sure it was him.  The women had him buried next to your granddaddy.  I think Anna Mayhew told you?”

 

Dean dips his chin in affirmation.

 

“Jed Willard has offered to build a church in town and name it after your granddaddy.  He feels awful about the accident.”

 

That’s what they’d all insisted on calling it, the weeping women, the uneasy men who’d come to put out the fire and stayed to watch the spectacle of the Winchesters’ last stand. 

 

Dean didn’t argue.  It wasn’t Jed Willard who’d killed Sam in the end.  Dean knows who’s really responsible.

 

“Dean…there wasn’t sign of anyone else in the barn.  Now, if that Lucas boy was in the loft when it caught, it’s likely his body was all burned up.  We’d never be able to find bone fragments or anything else in that mess.”  Bud gestures to the ruins, realizes what he’s doing, halts the motion awkwardly.

 

Dean shakes his head firmly and turns toward the house, waving with his hand to indicate that Bud should follow him.

 

Jane Mayhew had given Dean a slate and chalk so he could communicate with the women and girls who still came now and again to check on him, though he was as healed as he’d ever be.  It had taken him a while to get the hang of writing with his left hand.  His right was a molten ruin.

 

On the slate now, in sloppy block letters, Dean writes, “The wolf is still alive.  I’m going hunting.”

 

“Now, Dean,” Bud says, in the voice people reserve for idiots and lunatics.  “There’s no reason to think the other boy got out alive, and you’d be wasting your time trying to track him.  I know you’ve lost a lot, boy, but you’ve still got people in this town who care about you.  Your congregation—“

 

Dean shakes his head and turns away from the table, goes back outside and waits beside Bud’s horse where it’s tethered to the porch support.  His meaning is clear.

 

“Dean,” Bud tries again, voice weary and sad.

 

But Dean only crosses his arms and shakes his head again.  He’s left the slate inside.  He’s done arguing.

 

With a defeated sigh, Bud Grady unties his horse, remounts, and turns its head toward home.  “If you change your mind, the missus and I’d always be glad to have you.”

Dean doubts it.  As if to say so, he runs his ruined right hand over his hairless, scarred head and winks his left eye, which he’d lost to an ember.  Doc had had to take it out when it got infected, and Dean had refused a patch.  He wanted everyone in the world to see the marks of sin on his flesh, to know what he’d done with and to his brother and to take it as a warning never to stray from the path of righteousness.

 

Once upon a time, Dean would have preached about that, but now, voiceless and half-blind, he only turns his back to Bud Grady and goes inside.

 

He has packing to finish if he’s going to be on the Cimarron by morning.  He’s heard rumors on the wind of girls being attacked, and Dean thinks he’s picked up the trail of the wolf.

 

Shouldering the pack and picking up his rifle, Dean takes one last, long look around, but he doesn’t see anything worth remembering.

 

To the sound of the screen door slapping shut behind him, Dean sets out across the back fields, heading southwest toward OK.  He’ll buy a horse with the building money when he gets to Arapaho.

 

With crooked lips, he starts a tuneless whistle, in his head hearing “Onward Christian Soldier,” in his heart feeling only hellfire.

 

Out from the east comes a legend and with him rides damnation. 

 

 


End file.
